News & Events | Page 178 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Leaving New York City: an Interview with Cathy Linh Che

January 1, 2017 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews CATHY LINH CHE

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split, winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize, the 2015 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2016 Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Che is a Vietnamese American poet and teacher, originally from Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Poets House, and The Asian American Literary Review, among many others. Her poems have been published in Hyperallergic, Hyphen, poets.org, and AAWW’s The Margins. Her work delicately probes the liminal spaces between cultures, identities, nationalities, and bodies.

January 2017 Poetry Feature

January 1, 2017 Poetry

NEW POETS for the NEW YEAR

Please welcome Holly Burdorff, John Davis Jr., Nicholas Friedman, and Matt Salyer—four poets who are new to our pages, and welcome back TC contributor Tina Cane, the new Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.

December 2016 Poetry Feature

December 30, 2016 Poetry

New poems from our contributors: please welcome newcomers to The Common, Mik Awake and Elizabeth Scanlon, and welcome back L. S. Klatt and Ben Mazer.

Ask a Local: Antti Tuomainen, Helsinki, Finland

December 29, 2016 Interviews

With ANTTI TUOMAINEN

One of Antti Tuomainen’s favorite places in Helsinki is the beautiful Kaivopuisto park and the Baltic shore on the southernmost tip of downtown Helsinki, pictured here on a December morning.

Your name: Antti Tuomainen

Current city or town: Helsinki, Finland

How long have you lived here: 44 years

Deer Season

December 21, 2016 Dispatches

By MARTHA PARK

Deer Neighbor, hand-pulled linocut

When the radiators overheat we try to turn the knobs wearing oven mitts. At night it’s too hot to sleep, and we open the windows to the cold December air. My nose bleeds intermittently, suddenly, all winter long. I wake in the night to the hot rushing smell of iron, or, elbow-deep in dishwater suds, feel the blood coming too quick to stop.

Off Edgware Road

December 19, 2016 Essays, In House

By EMILY EVERETT

london snow

I first went to London as an undergrad, on a yearlong study abroad program in University College London’s intimidating English department. When I returned very reluctantly to the US, I often dreamed about London, but in those dreams I would find familiar places moved, distorted, and the people I missed not where I looked for them. After graduation, I moved again to the UK for a master’s program, but mainly to get back to London. I had discovered, after a few panicky weeks of foreign disorientation, that the city suited me—and also that my quiet home in Massachusetts no longer did. At 22, one seemed to preclude the other; London felt strange and exotic in a way that had become a daily necessity.

Review: The Senility of Vladimir Putin

December 17, 2016 Reviews

By MICHAEL HONIG
Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Nikolai Sheremetev, the protagonist of British novelist’s Michael Honig’s second book, is a Moscow nurse. For six years, he’s been looking after a private patient suffering from dementia. The patient’s condition is deteriorating. Prior to his illness, Vladimir P. had been a president of Russia. After his confusion grew and he could no longer hold his own in public, he was quietly replaced by a member of his team and sent into retirement to a private estate near Moscow. As Vladimir’s mental acuity deteriorated, Sheremetev became the single point of contact between him and the outside world. Sheremetev manages his daily schedule, his medications, his rare outings.

Friday Reads: December 2016

December 16, 2016 Reviews

By EMILY EVERETT, ALICIA LOPEZ, MEGAN TUCKER ORRINGER and SARAH WHELAN

To round out 2016, we’re reading novels new and old for December’s Friday Reads. Explore the social dynamics of male friendships, the black experience through generations and continents, the loneliness of a haunted orphan, and the self-consciousness (or self-destructiveness?) of the writer. After all, the dark days of winter are perfect for tackling big questions, and these towering works of fiction are perfect for raising them.

Recommended:

Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder, and Despair by Vladimir Nabokov.

Review: The Story of the Lost Child

December 12, 2016 Reviews

Book by ELENA FERRANTE
Reviewed by REBECCA CHACE

The Story of the Lost Child

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is complete with The Story of the Lost Child, making it possible to see the whole structure, which reveals itself in layers like Naples itself, where former cityscapes are buried by time, political violence, and natural disasters. Reading this final volume, it’s easy to forget that the first book, My Brilliant Friend, frames the entire work as a mystery—aside from the much-discussed secrecy of Ferrante, who uses a pen name, allows no photographs, and, with few exceptions, will only be interviewed via email or telephone. With this volume, Ferrante reminds us again that a question of authorship is embedded into the narrative—who is telling this story? Lila or Elena?

When All the Talking Fades

December 11, 2016 Dispatches

By CARSON VAUGHAN

There exists a certain splendor in the protestations of the electorate on the grounds of the Elected. Here, in the southern wing of the Nebraska State Capitol, roughly 75 farmers, ranchers, environmentalists, Native Americans and other dissidents have gathered to oppose construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and more specifically, the Governor’s authority to approve the pipeline’s path through Nebraska. They’ve come wearing belt buckles and Wrangler jeans, bolo ties and t-shirts that scream “Pipeline Fighter” and “#NOKXL.” But it’s difficult, in these marbled and dimly lit halls, not to feel awed by the stature of it all, the history cast in bronze and embossed beneath your feet. Even the atheist may be overcome by the grandeur of a cathedral.