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The Last Word

April 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 07, Issue 07 Fiction

By ARIEL DORFMAN

“Only he who attempts the absurd is

capable of achieving the impossible.”

—miguel de unamuno

Monday, april 17.

When you finish reading the last of these seven letters, you will be dead.

Oh, not right away, my enemy, my friend. There are still many pages to be turned, many words to be devoured. You will receive one letter every day, just like today, by courier with no return address, drip by drip, each morning’s venom, just in time, always just before you shut yourself tight and cozy inside your study to work on your most recent review, your daily dose of toxic excess.

from SANKYA

April 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 07, Issue 07 Fiction, Translation

By ZAKHAR PRILEPIN

That winter they hired a small bus—Mother had suggested that Father should be buried in the village. Where he was born.

Sasha hadn’t argued.

“What do you think, son?” asked Mother in a completely unfamiliar tone. Until then, there had always been a man’s voice that had the final word in the house. Now, that voice was dead.

Spindrift

April 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 07, Issue 07 Fiction

By W. ROSS FEELER

The mortician had trimmed the chaos of hair that had once sprouted from the ears and nostrils of Colton’s grandfather, but a single black arc of eyelash still lay like an unmatched parenthesis atop one bratwurst-colored cheek. Colton licked his thumb, as if readying to turn a page, touched the eyelash, and then studied it against the meaningless swirls of his fingerprint.

“Doesn’t he look natural?” Colton’s grandmother said. She stared down at the body, squeezed a dead shoulder. “That’s how I found him, honey. Just like that, with his eyes closed. Peaceful.”

Colton brushed the eyelash against his slacks and straightened his tie.

A World of Wonder

April 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 07, Issue 07 Fiction

By ELVIS BEGO

In Copenhagen there is a street that on certain days looks, feels even, like Sarajevo. Kingosgade, or Kingo Street. The same sootiness, the frayed composure. Kingo was some white-ruffed Danish giant of piety and poetry centuries ago. Like everybody else’s in those days, his neckpiece looked like someone had smashed a platter over his head and he never got around to getting it off, and in his portrait he seems all the more sullen for it—angry with himself for going to the painter’s studio with the ridiculous crockery still around his neck. He wrote psalms and sermons, that kind of thing. But Sarajevo never was pious. It is a city of mischief and raillery, of street wisdom. At least that’s what it was before it became the city of siege and bombardment.

Chanel

April 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 07, Issue 07 Fiction

By FRANCESCA MARCIANO

It was early September, the air still balmy, the perfect weather for a Venetian escapade. Caterina and Pascal were sitting in a café across a canal divining their future, in a quiet campo off the beaten track, away from the tourists and the film crowd who had invaded the city for the festival. They sipped their frothy iced cappuccinos, basking in the sun, their eyes fixed on its refractions dotting the greenish canal with specks of glitter. They felt that for once things were beginning to look promising for both of them.

Rethinking Utopia: An Interview with Rich Benjamin

April 1, 2014 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews RICH BENJAMIN

Rich Benjamin

Rich Benjamin is a journalist-adventurer and the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey To The Heart Of White America. He is a senior fellow at the think tank Demos in New York City, and a frequent commentator on NPR, Fox News, The New York Times and many other media outlets. Melody Nixon caught up with Rich Benjamin this spring, at his office overlooking the Flatiron building in Manhattan.

Review: The Marlowe Papers

March 31, 2014 Reviews

Book by ROS BARBER
Reviewed by JAMES DICKSON

I’ll be honest: when The Common asked me to review Ros Barber’s new book, The Marlowe Papers, I was leery. Novels-in-verse aren’t really my thing. Reading the back cover blurbs, I became even more skeptical: a novel in iambic pentameter (rhymed and blank verse) from the point of view of the English poet, playwright, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whom conspiracy theorists claim was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays? The book claims Marlowe’s death, in a bar-fight before the Church of England could charge him with heresy, was staged to let him escape England. And while in hiding, he ghost-wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays.

What the hell? I expected an overwrought, creepy fan-fiction piece in archaic diction and clumsy meter. After reading a few pages, I realized I owed Ms Barber an apology. This is a damn fine book.

A Living Infrastructure

March 28, 2014 Essays, Studio

By SCOTT GEIGER

Oysters in the Raritan Bay, courtesy of SCAPE Landscape Architecture

Next week Thursday, April 3, the amazing Rebuild by Design competition concludes in New York City. The finale event on Vesey Street in Manhattan is open to the public, and I think it well worth attending, even if you’re only just now learning about the competition. I’ve wanted to write about this competition since its launch last summer, and now as it comes to a close I can speculate a little about its significance.

Worth Seeing

March 27, 2014 Dispatches

By ANNA HOGELAND

The day after Thanksgiving, my parents and I drive from Laramie to Winter Park in a rental Buick. We go to see what we hear is worth seeing in Colorado, and we confuse it for all that there is.

We stop in Walden, just south of the Wyoming border and the Medicine Bow mountains. I wonder if the name has anything to do with Thoreau, or if names in the West aren’t after names in the East like names in the East are after places and people in England. I need a bathroom break and my father says it’d be nice to stretch his legs.

House by the Railroad

March 24, 2014 Essays

By JAMES ALAN GILL

The railroad track that ran behind my childhood home–one of several cheaply built ranch houses set on the edge of a small town, pre-approved for FHA loans–seemed a link to everything in the world, the same as every river or creek I passed over on bridges or waded in while fishing, led to bigger water: the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Gulf. Rails led on to other towns, led to St. Louis, which, according to elementary school textbooks, led everywhere west, connected everywhere east. And I wanted to be close to them.