Celebrating 15 Years
Yelabuga
April 25, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
Audio: “Basta” by Sara London
April 25, 2015
Issue 09, Podcasts & Audio
Sara London reads her poem “Basta” from Issue 09 of The Common.
The King of Bubbles
April 23, 2015
Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction
By EDIE MEIDAV
Sinking lower in the club’s hot tub and today a birthday marks his face one notch less recognizable when anyway, meeting someone these days means who you say you are matters both less and more. Who cares, really? Get older and it becomes easier to say who you are not. No king of industry, that myth abandoned before anyone finished saying Constantinople, but who even says Constantinople anymore, such flourish abandoned in his particular past as a history major, an epoch in which windmilling toward the future seemed to matter, toting around the flag of belief that what happened before could actually help you later. Now just a service-minded bumbler close to retirement going around to enlighten the masses and so what if certain efforts fizzled? Could happen to anyone.
Review: Thorn
April 23, 2015
Reviews
Book by EVAN MORGAN WILLIAMS
Reviewed by
The protagonists of the 15 stories in Thorn, by Evan Morgan Williams, are a diverse cast: Native American, white, black, Asian; young and old; men, women; rich, poor. Yet Williams, who won the 2014 G.S. Charat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, with this debut collection, is able to inhabit his protagonists, as well as to empathize with them. This is no mean feat. Many of Williams’s protaganists are women in crisis, and he has an uncanny ability to take on their voices.
All his characters are struggling, isolated, and vulnerable. They harbor secret yearnings and are ashamed of themselves for them. None get what they desire or need in these stories, many of which are heart-wrenching.
Amherst College Reports on about Contemporary Arabic Literature
April 23, 2015
News and Events
Amherst College covers a conversation in which panelists discuss the challenges and opportunities of translating and publishing Arabic literature.
Jesse Owens, Mr. Harris, and Me
April 21, 2015
Essays, Issue 09, Issue 09 Essays
This is how my mother tells it. Jesse Owens taught her to run. I am thirteen. I have just come back from track practice. I have no skill at anything athletic. But junior high for me has been a series of attempts to assimilate. That year in the yearbook, there isn’t a club I’m not in—Chess Club, Stamp Collecting, French Club, Honors Society—and because track is the only sport you do not have to try out for, they’ll take anyone, I sit in the front row of the photo, a dark spot in the expanse of white faces.
April 2015 Poetry Feature
April 17, 2015
Poetry
Celebrate Poetry Month with 9 new poems by our contributors!
Ask a Local: Melissa Kwasny, Jefferson City, MT
April 16, 2015
Interviews
With MELISSA KWASNY
Your Name: Melissa Kwasny
Current city or town: Jefferson City, Montana
How long have you lived here? I live four miles up a dirt road from Jefferson City, a stage stop that has seen better days, hence the unlikely name Jefferson City. It consists of a post office, a bar that closes and reopens depending on the fortunes of a nearby gold mine, and a hall for the volunteer fire department, wherein we vote. I have lived in this particular canyon for 25 years, and in the shade of these particular mountains, on and off, for 40.
Where Does the Time Go?
April 15, 2015
Essays, Issue 09, Issue 09 Essays
My relationship with Joni Mitchell and her music moves through two stages. My early admiration for her—in the seventies—in some ways anticipated the zeitgeist. Then I stopped listening to her for about a quarter of a century. I began to rediscover Mitchell’s work in the new millennium, when, by coincidence, so was the rest of the world.
Calling
April 15, 2015
Dispatches
By MEGAN HARLAN
My first day in Bukit Tinggi, a town in the rain forest-swathed mountains of West Sumatra—a region home to the Minangkabau ethnic group, the world’s largest matrilineal society—I swore I heard a woman calling the Muslim midday prayer broadcasting from a white mosque.
