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Friday Reads: January 2015

January 16, 2015 Reviews

By ZEINA HASHEM BECK, MELODY NIXON, FRANCESCA MARCIANO, STEPHEN O’CONNOR, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

As we begin 2015, our recommenders are heading into the wilderness. These books range widely through time and space, each embracing its own unique heart of contradiction—exile and home; passion and failure; reason and chaos; doubt and confidence. Heavy with both fictional biography and memoir, we bring you familiar faces from the dark woods of alienation and obsession. Dive into the new year with these five maps by which to recognize yourself and find a path through the forest.

Recommended:

The Same Roads Back by Frank Dullaghan, The Season of Migration by Nellie Hermann, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Review: Almost Famous Women

January 13, 2015 Reviews

Book by MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN
Reviewed by KELLY FORDON

Almost Famous Women

Fans of Megan Mayhew Bergman’s first short-story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, which appeared in 2012, have been looking forward to her second collection ever since. The premise of Bergman’s new book, Almost Famous Women, is immediately intriguing. Bergman culled through the annals of history to locate women who brushed up against fame, thanks to proximity to famous people or now-forgotten accomplishments. Publisher’s Weekly commended her for this “feminist reclamation” of narratives largely ignored; a compilation of 13 fictionalized tales of women including James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia; Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy in “Gone with the Wind”; Allegra Byron, Lord Byron’s cast-off daughter; and Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s impetuous, drug-addled, niece.

January 2015 Poetry Feature

January 9, 2015 Poetry

At The Common, we’re celebrating the New Year with four poets new to our pages.

Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

January 8, 2015 Reviews

Book by RICHARD FLANAGAN
Reviewed by FRANCESCA DE ONIS

A bee
Staggers out
Of the peony.

Richard Flanagan’s new novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, begins with an enigmatic haiku by Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet, which evokes a state of sublime consummation or mortal exhaustion, in other words, how love and war, beauty and horror are inextricably entwined.

Flanagan has explored these opposites of the human condition in three previous novels, set in Van Dieman’s Land, now the island of Tasmania, off the coast of New Zealand. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the 2014 winner of the Man Booker Prize, and in Flanagan’s other work, this remote, timeless region is his equivalent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Marquez’s Macondo, a mythic terrain in which he explores the resilience and courage of the human spirit.

Arches and Canyonlands

January 7, 2015 Dispatches

By ANNA HOGELAND

I expect the countless eyes and cameras that have adored this place to have dulled it. But I see all colors in the desert; and they’re not tainted, as far as I can tell. I try to learn the terms and reasons for why it became the way it is. I don’t forget one name—desert varnish: the volcanic gleam over rusty red cliffs, as if spread by palette knife—and I repeat it in my head every time I pass it.

The Best American Poetry 2012

January 6, 2015 News and Events

The Best American Poetry 2012, ed. Mark Doty, included Mary Jo Salter’s “The Gods” and Honor Moore’s “Song,” both from The Common Issue 01.

Better Posture, a Longer Life, and Great Sex: An Interview with Diane Cook

January 6, 2015 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews DIANE COOK

Diane Cook

Diane Cook’s debut short-story collection Man V. Nature was recently published by HarperCollins. The New York Times called it a book of “great beauty and strangeness.” Cook is a former producer on NPR’s “This American Life” and a graduate of the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. She currently lives in Oakland, California where she is at work on a novel. S. Tremaine Nelson talked with Cook about writing “unnerving” stories, her least favorite author, and the many perks of novel writing.

The Review Review (2013)

January 5, 2015 News and Events

The Review Review gives Issue 04 five stars, saying it “seamlessly blends style, presentation, and experimentation with pieces that celebrate the universal human experiences of love, loneliness, heartbreak, and anxiety.”

Like Fire (2011)

January 5, 2015 News and Events

Like Fire welcomes The Common as “a fresh contender in the lovely summertime stream of literary journals, one that’s absolutely worth taking a look at.”