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Review: The Queen of the Night

February 2, 2016 Reviews

Book by ALEXANDER CHEE
Reviewed by JULIA LICHTBLAU

The Queen of the Night

Every so often a contemporary novel makes me want to go back to college—not because I don’t get it, but because the book induces a craving to know everything about its world. Reading The Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee’s hefty second novel, ten years in the making, I was ready to fill out the applications for a Master’s in 19th century French history and literature (with a minor in opera).

Set mostly in France under the Second Empire, (1866–1872), it’s the first-person narrative of a silver-voiced American orphan and master of self-reinvention, who becomes a European opera star and brushes the pinnacles of European power before crashing back to earth in the New World. Her rebirth wouldn’t be out of place on reality TV.

January 2016 Poetry Feature

January 29, 2016 Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

New Work for the New Year

This month we welcome Cassandra Cleghorn to our pages, presenting poems included in her first book, Four Weathercocks, which will be published by Marick Press in March. We’re also happy to be welcoming back TC contributors David Lehman, Jonathan Moody, and Sylvie Durbec. Lehman’s new book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Jonathan Moody won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize for his collection Olympic Butter Gold, published in November 2015. The book includes five poems first published in The Common. Jean Follain Prize-winner Sylvie Durbec’s poem “Shining Red in the Torrent” is offered here in its entirety, translated by Denis Hirson. An excerpt from the poem was published in The Common Issue 10.

Review: The Small Backs of Children

January 23, 2016 Reviews

BY LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
Reviewed by ANDREW WILLIS

The Small Backs of Children

In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart defended the First Amendment right of movie theaters to show a French art film called The Lovers. With characteristic candor, Stewart wrote that he knew the film was not pornographic because even though he couldn’t strictly define such material, he could say, rather famously now, “I know it when I see it.” When he saw The Lovers, he didn’t see “it,” that “hard-core” obscenity; he saw art. I envy Stewart’s certainty, his uncannily astute powers of perception. I can’t always claim that I see the clear line between art and obscenity, or the times in which art, for art’s sake, justifies the dubious means of its creation. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is merely the latest to leave me wondering about art and the blurred lines it creates.

Ask a Local: V. Penelope Pelizzon, Willimantic, CT

January 21, 2016 Interviews

With V. PENELOPE PELIZZON

Your name: V. Penelope Pelizzon

Current city or town: Willimantic, Connecticut

How long have you lived here: 13 years.

Review: A General Theory of Oblivion

January 20, 2016 Reviews

Book by JOSÉ EDUARDO AGUALUSA
Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

A General Theory of Oblivion

War. Diamonds and oil and war. If in the United States we’ve heard anything about Angola, it’s likely related to the protracted bloodshed or to the trade in oil and diamonds. The seventh largest country in Africa, situated on the Atlantic coast just north of Namibia, Angola became a Portuguese colony in the 16th century. Fighting for self-government began in 1961 and went on until the 1974 Carnation Revolution and the end of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal led to the country’s withdrawal and, in 1975, Angolan independence. This did not end war in Angola, however.

Fueled by the oil and diamond trades and Cold War politics, groups of former resistance fighters consolidated their positions and went on fighting each other. Supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba on one side and the United States and (white) South Africa on the other, the fighting in Angola went on until a key leader was killed in action in 2002, ending 41 years of nearly uninterrupted fighting.

Up North

January 20, 2016 Dispatches

By CHRIS KELSEY

We booked three nights but stayed four. We traveled in-state to save money but spent just as much as we might have on flights to the West Coast. It was November. Going against all reason at our latitude, we headed north.

Linefork: In Proximity to a Movie in the Making

January 16, 2016 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

storyboard

A familiar sound comes from the other room. A voice—from Kentucky; from a monitor speaker, ten feet away in Massachusetts. I hear it in the kitchen. A clip of speech, a cadence heard again and for not the last time. Open floor plan living: all sounds permeate. Racket of chickens, dogs, lilting voice, banjo.

A film, incomplete—still very much its audio-visual pieces. We cohabitate, this thing and I. I am not the maker, though he lives here too. I am adjacent to the making.

I was there when it happened. The beginnings of this thing that has now sprawled through our lives. That was three years ago, on a summer road trip from Boston to points south, stopping to see friends in Charlottesville, Nashville, Memphis, before making our way back north.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ Poem Reprinted in Best American Poetry 2016

January 16, 2016 News and Events

The Best American Poetry 2016, ed. Edward Hirsch, included Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ “The First Last Light in the Sky,” from The Common Issue 09.

Friday Reads: January 2016

January 15, 2016 Reviews

By DIDI JACKSON, MICHELLE ROSS, JENNIFER ACKER, ALEKSANDRA BURSHTEYN, BEN SHATTUCK, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

We’re charging into the new year reading slim volumes with grand ambitions. These books and their authors look to visual art, science, medicine, and history to pull literature—and with it the reader—in a new direction. We’re reading deeply in order to carve and reclaim human stories from disease, politics, the simplifying narratives of recorded history, and a monolithic literary canon. In 2016, read to embrace the “exquisite ache” of complexity with us!

Recommended:

I Watched You Disappear by Anya Krugovoy Silver, Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya, High Dive by Jonathan Lee, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes

On Translation, Proust, and Advice for Young Poets: an Interview with Gregory Rabassa

January 10, 2016 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews GREGORY RABASSA

Gregory Rabassa is a genius you might pass on the streets of New York City without even knowing it. Born in 1922, he lived the early years of his life in Yonkers, New York before moving to a farm near Hanover, New Hampshire, four miles from Dartmouth College, where he studied as an undergraduate. In 1967, in his very first attempt at translation, Gregory Rabassa won the National Book Award for his translation of Julio Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (Hopscotch in English). Rabassa’s translation schedule filled up, and, in his own words, he was “too busy” with other projects when Gabriel García Márquez approached him about translating Cien Años de Soledad. At Cortázar’s urging, García Márquez agreed to wait three years until Rabassa’s schedule cleared. Upon the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1970, García Márquez famously declared that Rabassa’s English version of his book was better than the Spanish original.