August Reads: If You Open a Window and Make Love to the World: An Interview with A.L. Kennedy

MARNI BERGER interviews A.L. KENNEDY

For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume on September 1.

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A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee, Scotland. She is the author of 15 books: six novels, six short story collections, and three works of nonfiction. She is a fellow of both theRoyal Society of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature. She writes for publications in the UK and overseas and has a blog with The Guardian Online. In addition to author, she is a dramatist for the stage, radio, TV, and film, and a standup comedian. Her All The Rage—a collection of short stories—was published by Little A Books in spring 2014. Marni Berger and A.L. spoke about the culture of humor, constructing the landscapes of characters’ minds, and what it means to “write to please.”

August Reads: If You Open a Window and Make Love to the World: An Interview with A.L. Kennedy
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August Reads: Fore Street

By DIANA BABINEAU 

Portland was vibrant, despite its mistiness; always threatening to rain, but never truly downpouring. G. and I walked up and down Fore Street, looking for the restaurant by the same name, trying not to look too much like lost tourists. We had escaped to Portland in search of good food, which was always a comfort to us and which we needed now more than ever. Finishing our undergraduate degrees a few weeks earlier had left us feeling more somber and empty than excited. After days of enduring many heartfelt goodbyes from friends we knew we’d never see again and lengthy advice from proud, overbearing relatives, we were aching to get away from it all; to distract ourselves from the constant reminders that a chapter in our lives was closing forever.

August Reads: Fore Street
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August Reads: On Naming

By MELODY NIXON

For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume September 1.

Filthy McNasty's Sign

To exist humanly, is to name the world, to change it. ~Paulo Freire

When I was 19 my full-time job was bartending a pub called Filthy McNasty’s. McNasty’s sat on Rose Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the roughest streets in the city center at the time. Fights punctuated each hour of the night and later, after I’d moved on up from McNasty’s, a friend was stabbed near there in a skinhead-like attack. Indoors, customers called me “Garth” because of my wild, unkempt hair, like Garth in Wayne’s World. I didn’t wear makeup and favored baggy jeans and t-shirts; I guess this made me infuriatingly gender ambiguous. My fellow bartenders, with their straightened, bleached-blonde hair, penciled-on brows and figure-hugging polyester tolerated Garth to the best of their abilities, aside from one woman, whose actual name I don’t remember, but whose tan outfits—tight pants and jacket—and extremely thick accent conjured the name “Tanner” in my mind. This word, Tanner, also captured the sound of her voice. She clearly despised me/Garth. She would sashay away from us when the bar wasn’t full enough to force us close together. We could barely understand one another’s accents so the physical distance was a welcome relief.

August Reads: On Naming
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2015 Brooklyn Book Festival: “Falling Through”

Event Date:
Sunday, September 20, 2015 – 10:00am6:00pm
Location:
Korean War Veterans Plaza, Brooklyn, NY

Join The Common at the 2015 Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 20!

Come see us at Booth #145, where we’ll be selling copies of The Common and giving away TC-themed goodies!

2015 Brooklyn Book Festival: “Falling Through”
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Continental Divide

By JAMES ALAN GILL

We decided we’d stop for the night in Denver while eating at a Taco Johns in North Platte, Nebraska, and scanned the Expedia app on my phone. There was a 4-star hotel in the suburbs northwest of the city on sale for 86 bucks, so I reserved a room because it was the same price as the Best Western.

Continental Divide
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Review: Smaller and Smaller Circles

Book by F.H. BATACAN
Reviewed by KRISTABELLE MUNSON

Smaller and Small Circles

The last time I visited Manila, in April 2013, I tripped over a body in the street. It was 1 a.m. It was a boy sleeping on a piece of cardboard. He rubbed his eyes, picked up the cardboard, and walked into the night. Reading Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan took me into the hot, dark nights of Manila during the rainy season. It’s 1997, a decade after the People Power Revolution that toppled the Marcos regime. And still, boys turn up dead every month in the communities around the massive Payatas garbage dump near Quezon City. The bodies all show signs of ritualistic killings, in which the faces of the boys have been obliterated by the killer. But Filipino culture denies the existence of serial killers. Filipinos are too warm and friendly for such monsters to emerge in their midst. And with the generations living together, no one is ever alone.

Review: Smaller and Smaller Circles
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View from Up High: An Interview with Jacquelyn Pope

MARNI BERGER interviews JACQUELYN POPE

Jacquelyn Pope is the author of the poetry collection Watermark (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005). Her next book, Hungerpots—translations of the Dutch poet Hester Knibbe—is due out in October from Eyewear Publishing in the UK. Jacquelyn is the recipient of a 2015 National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

View from Up High: An Interview with Jacquelyn Pope
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Moussa v. Meursault: Algerian Grudge Match Over “The Stranger”

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

mersault book

The gruesome Algerian War ended in 1962 with France walking away empty-handed from a territory that it had held for 130 years and considered not just a colony but an integral part of itself. The refusal of the pieds-noirs, the French colonists in Algeria, to concede meaningful rights to Arab citizens had made a peaceful independence impossible. The war, which featured ideological and tactical use of terrorism and torture on both sides, now a hallmark of intractable conflicts between the West and the Islamic world, brought down multiple French governments and the Fourth Republic before Charles de Gaulle accepted the inevitable. It also brought a flood of immigrants, harkis, Algerians who had fought on the French side; and many more who hadn’t, as France entered les trente glorieuses, its 30-year period of post-war prosperity. During this same period, Algeria’s economy, weighed down by state dominance, corruption, and dependence on hydrocarbons, failed to produce opportunity for its youthful, fast-growing population. Some five million people of Algerian descent live in France today, many in the crime-ridden housing projects of French suburbs, where integration is almost impossible.

Moussa v. Meursault: Algerian Grudge Match Over “The Stranger”
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