Celebrating 15 Years
Your name: Arna Bontemps Hemenway
Current city or town: Waco, TX
How long have you lived here: Going on three years
Ask a Local: Arna Bontemps Hemenway, Waco, TX
December 13, 2015
Interviews
December 2015 Poetry Feature
December 11, 2015
Poetry, Translation
We are pleased to present the second installment of our two-part feature on New Poetry from China, translated by Stephen Haven and Li Yongyi. Click on the titles below to view bilingual editions of new poetry by Yang Jian, Mo Fei, and Li Yongyi.
Pressure Makes Diamonds: an Interview with Rowan Ricardo Phillips
December 8, 2015
Interviews
MARNI BERGER interviews ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
Rowan Ricardo Phillips was born and raised in New York City and is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Brown University, where he earned his doctorate in English Literature. He is the author of two books of poems, Heaven and The Ground: Poems, as well as a book of essays, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, and a book of translations of Salvador Espriu’s Catalan collection of short stories, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. Rowan is the winner of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2013 PEN/Osterweil Prize for Poetry, a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, and the 2013 GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry. In 2015 he made the National Book Awards Longlist for Poetry. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Stony Brook, and he is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. He lives in both Barcelona and New York City.
Phillips and Berger discussed the stenography of poetry and the “beautiful challenge” of geography as “fate.”
Period Rooms
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It was a long, elaborate, symmetrical Adam room, with two bays of windows opening into Green Park. The light, streaming in from the west on the afternoon when I began to paint there, was fresh green from the young trees outside.
—Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The serene, neoclassical “Dining Room from Lansdowne House,” designed by Robert Adam in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art eerily matches Evelyn Waugh’s description down to the green light and the house’s fate: two wings demolished in 1930 to make way for a road, and the rest converted to an eating club in London’s Berkeley Square. In Brideshead Revisited, contractors are about to pull down Marchmain House and replace it with a block of flats. The Landsdowne Dining Room, in its symmetry and restraint, exudes confidence in the rightness and durability of inherited privilege.
Contributors in Conversation: Elvis Bego and W. Ross Feeler
December 5, 2015
Podcasts & Audio
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 07 contributors Elvis Bego and W. Ross Feeler read and discuss their stories “A World of Wonder” and “Spindrift.”
Friday Reads: December 2015
December 4, 2015
Reviews
AWP Writers Conference in Los Angeles
December 3, 2015
News and Events
Event Date:
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 – 12:00pm – Saturday, April 2, 2016 – 11:59pm
Location:
Los Angeles Convention Center & JW Marriott Los Angeles
The Common will host a booth at AWP 2016 from March 30–April 2. Visit us at Booth 838! See our list of events and gatherings below. In addition to the events, we will be holding a raffle to win a lifetime subscription to The Common! Visit Booth 838 to enter!
Rowing to Dubai
December 3, 2015
Dispatches
By GEOFF KRONIK
Every morning I sat on the terrace and waited for him. Night would fade to gray dawn, the sun’s first rays struck the kilometer-high spire of Burj Khalifa,and then the sculler would appear. No other craft plied Dubai Creek at that hour, no working dhows or party cruises. River belonged to sculler and sculler to his boat, and I would sit with my coffee and envy him.
Ivory Teeth
November 27, 2015
Essays
My mother is driving us away from Spokane International Airport when she tells me about the elk. Before dawn, she warmed her Ford Ranger and headed into town, planning to catch up on some work before I arrived from Baltimore. At one moment there was no elk. And the next: elk. A world of elk and the metallic rip of something under the hood, the sort of sound I fear on the long flights home. That undeniable knowledge that something has gone horribly wrong.
Getting Bombed
November 24, 2015
Dispatches
To get to St. Govan’s Head on the southwest coast of Wales I must drive through the Ministry of Defense firing range at Castlemartin where space-age tanks launch high explosive shells across the sky. They’ve been blowing things up here since 1939. There’s a website that will tell me when the road is closed for target practice, but I’d have to drive miles in another direction to the McDonald’s in Haverfordwest to hook up to the free wifi. Instead, I stop at an inn along the way where I order a lemonade, which is carbonated and tastes like Sprite. They tell me today’s bombing begins after sunset. Welsh Pubs are usually reliable sources of information.
