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Book Shopping in Lisbon

December 12, 2014 Essays

Bookstore

It’s Thanksgiving Day across the Atlantic in Massachusetts, where I live. There, among my American family and friends, it’s a quiet, contemplative day, but here in the Chiado, the heart of downtown Lisbon and the city’s oldest shopping district, everything is bustling, as if the Portuguese are scurrying to get a one-day head start on Black Friday. It’s a raw, drizzly day, a sign of winter’s approach, and the cobbled sidewalks are slippery. I’ve walked these hilly streets for 35-plus years, often darting from one bookstore to the next—new, used, rare—flipping through the pages of everything from current bestsellers, to obscure dime-store colonial-era comics, to rare folios of brightly-colored, highly inaccurate antique maps. That’s what I’m doing today, I’m book shopping.

Contributors in Conversation: Rowan Moore Gerety and Eleanor Stanford

December 10, 2014 Podcasts & Audio

In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 06 contributors Rowan Moore Gerety and Eleanor Stanford read and discuss their essays “Well-Armed” and “Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde).”

Like Breath

December 10, 2014 Dispatches

By TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN

We are standing in front of Mark Rothko’s Black, Red Over Black on Red at the Centre Pompidou.

“I love Rothko,” says my companion. “I am not crazy about modern American art, but Rothko is different.” A painter himself, my companion is a talkative man behind whose frail body and white hair is an energetic, sometimes erratic mind. “Look,” he says, as he moves closer to the painting, the guard keeping a polite watch over us. “The way he has layered the painting—as if he were breathing it.”

Often from Kansas: A Conversation with Sarah Smarsh on the Privilege of Rootedness in Midwestern America

December 9, 2014 Interviews

MARNI BERGER interviews SARAH SMARSH

Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh has reported on social justice, the environment, culture, and class for Harper’s, The Huffington Post, Guernica, The Pitch, Aeon, and others. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, as well as degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas, and has taught at Washburn University, Columbia, and elsewhere. A fellow of the Center for Kansas Studies, earlier in her career she wrote about her home state for everything from airline magazines to pop-history paperback series. Her essay “Death of the Farm Family” appears in Issue 08 of The Common. Marni Berger and Smarsh discussed the privilege of rootedness in America and what it means to be “often from” a place.

Flying the Hump

December 5, 2014 Essays

By LIESL SCHWABE

airplane

In Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where I grew up, Rex Humbard was the first Pentecostal evangelist to have his own television program. Next to the Cathedral of Tomorrow, where he hosted his weekly broadcast, he also built an enormous tower—locally known as Rex’s Erection—with the intent of making one of those revolving restaurants like at Niagara Falls. But despite eventually officiating at Elvis’s funeral, Humbard ran out of money and, ever since, the tower has just stood there, tall and useless. Though my grandfather, who was a flight instructor at Kent State, once told me that pilots used the tower as a landmark when giving their coordinates over the radio.

Ask a Local: Christine Byl, Healy, AK

December 4, 2014 Interviews

With CHRISTINE BYL

Your name: Christine Byl

Current town: Healy, AK, just north of Denali National Park

How long have you lived here? 10+ years

Seeking Warmth, Among Other Things

December 4, 2014 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

(1)
Even in the raw of winter, the succulent house will be hot and dry. The air in the palm house will be thick. These alternating glass houses of desert, forest, floral exotica—carnivorous pitcher plants and living stones—will be a refuge when New England is in February; one way to survive the cold.

The greenhouses making up the Lyman Conservatory at Smith College are a study in organization and chaos. The sheer quantity, cluttered within such limited space, suggests the joy of a free-form gatherer (if not hoarder), mixed with the scientific precision called for in a true botanical garden. The product of the exploratory impulse and a ‘you can take it with you’ attitude, overlaid with classification and order. Every thing labeled. Conquered artifacts from near and far, brought from there to here, alive.

Contemporary Arabic Fiction: A Conversation

December 3, 2014 News and Events

Event Date:

Tuesday, March 24, 2015 – 4:30pm – 6:30pm

Location:

FAYERWEATHER HALL 115, Amherst College

Join internationally known writers, editors, and translators for a lively conversation.

What themes, styles, and innovative collaborations are emerging in Middle Eastern fiction? What linguistic, political, and cultural opportunities and challenges do Arabic writers and their editors face in translating and publishing new works?

Reception to follow.

Petite Fleur

December 3, 2014 Dispatches

By TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN

In the Paris Métro last summer, heading to the Chatelet station on my way home after a wayward day, I caught the sound of a saxophone and that familiar melody from decades past, Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur. I could tell the music was coming from a source close by, perhaps only a few rows behind me. I froze, not knowing what to do as though I were in the grip of something large and timeless.

Review: Lila

December 2, 2014 Reviews

Book by MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Reviewed by CHANTAL CORCORAN

Lila

“For a town, it wasn’t such a bad place,” observes Lila, a transient passing through Gilead, who ends up staying to marry an old widowed minister; she’s also the character for whom Marilynne Robinson has titled her most recent novel. Lila is Robinson’s third book to examine the lives and devotions of a small group of characters in this secluded Christian prairie town in Southwest Iowa. While each book is an independent work, shining on its own—Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and Home won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a National Book Award finalist—the overlapping narratives weave a complex tapestry of the human experience as it relates to personal faith.