News & Events | Page 193 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Conversing Between: an Interview with Maurice Emerson Decaul

March 13, 2016 Interviews

SARETTA MORGAN interviews MAURICE EMERSON DECAUL

Maurice Emerson Decaul is a poet, essayist, playwright, and librettist, whose work has appeared in The Common, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Narrative, Callaloo, and Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, among others. A graduate of Columbia and New York Universities, he is currently working toward his MFA at Brown University.

Saretta Morgan corresponded with Decaul over several weeks by email, in person, and on the phone during the winter of 2015–2016. Both poets and military veterans, Morgan and Decaul talked about New Orleans, theater, race, and the military, as their conversation moved between themes of structure, dreams, and collectivity.

International Mention: Arablit.org

March 13, 2016 News and Events

Arablit.org reviews our March 2015 conversation on contemporary Arabic fiction, which included readings by short-story writers Hassan Blasim and Hisham Bustani.

Friday Reads: March 2016

March 11, 2016 Reviews

By NALINI JONES, JAMES ALAN GILL, MORGAN ADAMS, GBOLAHAN ADEOLA

This month, invest in a book you can begin knowing you’ll return many times. These works range the world from Bombay to Russia to Nigeria to San Francisco, and in page count from the “slender” to the “massive”—you’ll find something here for every interest, every schedule, every commute length. But each of this month’s recommenders chose their work in part for the fact that it seems to yield a new story on every visit; as Nalini Jones puts it, you’ll “feel the world tilt to the side” in a new direction every time you dip into these pages.

Recommended:

Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of their Popularity by Whitney Otto, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Famished Road by Ben Okri

Review: Bird

March 5, 2016 Reviews

Book by NOY HOLLAND
Reviewed by FRANCESCA DE ONIS-TOMLINSON

Bird

Admirers of slim, erotically charged novels will greet Noy Holland’s first novel Bird with a sense of discovery. For fans of her three short story collections, Bird is a satisfying evolution of her lyrical, unsettling prose that ratchets the tension between poetic language and mythic narrative, and feels both deeply modern and ancient.

Bird is a ballad to vanished love, to an erotic connection akin to rapture that the main character, whose nickname is Bird, cannot escape, even though Mickey, her golden bad boy lover, took her places she shouldn’t have gone.

The present is one autumn day 12 years after Mickey’s abrupt departure “in order not to kill her.” Bird is breast-feeding her infant daughter after a difficult birth, her second child. She might be suffering from post-partum depression—certainly she has let herself go. Married to the doctor who treated the wounds Mickey inflicted, she lives in the countryside, trying to find solace in domesticity, but yearning for the thrills of the past.

Journals in Ice

March 3, 2016 Essays

By KELLE GROOM

107 Water Street, Stonington, CT

One day I entered this room and wasn’t afraid of ghosts. It was after a friend phoned, spoke in a register that calmed me. But tonight, opening the yellow door with its gold metal sun, there’s a knitting-up in me. As if a spider lives in my throat, wove a web inside my chest. Inner bodice of silk he runs up, pulls. On a pound-for-pound basis spider silk is stronger than steel. Remember that Ivy said the scarlet room always felt occupied.

Nighthawks Down Under

March 2, 2016 Dispatches

By WESLEY STRATON

On our first date he took me to a bar disguised as an apartment. Down a narrow alley (they call them laneways there), up a step, through a door marked “1A.” The room was small and nearly empty, all dark wood and white walls. A fire did its quiet work in one corner, its light gleaming on the unlabeled bottles that lined the shelves. He knew everyone, and the beautiful, tattooed bartenders spoke to me like family.

Snow

February 27, 2016 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

That Friday, in preparation for the storm, we leave work in the middle of the day. We fill our cars with gasoline, stock up on coffee and alcohol, check out books from the library, and then come home to peer out our windows and stare up at the sky. This is just snow—thin gray streaks of ordinary snow—but I can’t help it: I’m transfixed.

All night on the local news, the broadcasters glimmer with anticipation. More than a foot, they predict, maybe two. They roll through the highways in news vans while warning us to stay inside. They spend several minutes interviewing a woman about the plastic shovel she is standing in line to purchase. They have the happy unhurried look about them that newscasters often do in the days right before Christmas when they have been granted a reprieve from the stories of gunshots and house fires in order to report on Santa Claus and Christmas lights—a momentary pause in which none of us are asked to care about anything larger than what a child would see.

MassLive Covers Upcoming Amherst College LitFest

February 26, 2016 News and Events

MassLive reports on the upcoming Amherst College 2016 LitFest, which will occur from March 3-5 on the Amherst College campus.

February 2016 Poetry Feature

February 21, 2016 Poetry

Please join us in greeting new contributors Dolores Hayden and Zack Strait—and a big welcome back to Robin Chapman and Alex Cigale.

Review: Desert Songs of the Night: An Anthology of 1500 Years of Arabic Literature

February 20, 2016 Reviews

Book by SUHEIL BUSHRUI and JAMES MALARKEY
Reviewed by GRETCHEN MCCULLOUGH

Desert Songs of the Night

Suheil Bushrui and James Malarkey’s anthology, Desert Songs of the Night: An Anthology of 1500 years of Arabic Literature, is not aptly named. The romantic title conjures up an image of a bard, reciting poetry and telling stories in the Arabian desert by a fire: the very best poetry and tales from the Arabic literary tradition. In fact, the anthology is a collection of a wide range of texts, reflecting the rich cultural history and thought of Arabic heritage: chivalric verse, political, philosophical, and legal treatises, religious texts, moralistic essays, folktales, travel writing, excerpts from plays and memoirs and modern narrative poetry.

The collection is tempered by the academic backgrounds and interests of the two editors. Suheil Bushrui, who died last year at 84, was a distinguished critic and translator, an authority on Yeats and Kahlil Gibran and the founder and former director of the George and Lisa Zakhem Kahlil Gibran Center for Values and Peace at the University of Maryland. James Malarkey was Professor Emeritus at Antioch University, the former Chair of Humanities and General Education with past stints at universities in Algeria and Beirut. He is an anthropologist, specializing in Algerian politics.