With RENEE SIMMS
Name: Renee Simms
Current city: University Place, WA, which is a suburb five minutes outside of Tacoma
How long have you lived here: Since 2011
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED. Check back for rescheduling. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Hisham Bustani and Thoraya El-Rayyes will lead a translation master class. Drawing on texts in an array of source languages, the master class will focus on important literary considerations for translators, translation techniques, and the experimental and collaborative process of translation.
To register, email info@thecommononline.org.
Part of the Copeland Colloquium Program at Amherst College.
By CHRIS KELSEY
Nothing could be done about the cancer in him, so we did not bring him bread. He was dying, and doing so more actively now, though still at a pace he commanded. Even Death let him call most of the shots. We brought Sol what he wanted: vodka and cigarettes.
1. A few days before I moved to Baltimore this summer, I read an article about the city’s racial dynamics that had just been published by D. Watkins, a relatively young black writer who’d grown up in Baltimore. He described a city so racially segregated that it felt like two different places: one black, one white; one dangerous, one quaint; one introduced to him as a kid growing up in East Baltimore and one that he found later as a college student in North Baltimore, attending the predominately white private liberal arts college, where I had just accepted a job. Watkins painted a picture of two adjacent but separate worlds, a place where, he says, white people somehow manage to host literary events in a city that is more than 60% black without one black face in the crowd.
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
Book by MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN
Reviewed by
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.
At The Common, we’re celebrating the New Year with four poets new to our pages.
Book by RICHARD FLANAGAN
Reviewed by
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.
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, ed. Mark Doty, included Mary Jo Salter’s “The Gods” and Honor Moore’s “Song,” both from The Common Issue 01.
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Celebrating 15 Years