By ROSSANEE NURFARIDA
Translated from the Thai by NOH ANOTHAI
Bangkok, Thailand
Seven years ago…
My grandmother was ninety,
but didn’t know what a coup d’etat was
on that night the people had
their voices stolen from them.
By MIAH JEFFRA
Review by YELENA FURMAN
The city as a character in its own right is a frequent device in otherwise disparate novels. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), a water-shimmering, pleasure-seeking Venice forms the fabric of the female protagonist’s life. Andrei Bely’s modernist tour-de-force Petersburg (1916), following a long tradition in Russian literature, portrays this city as both the site and driver of the action. For the navel-gazing narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), Paris and other locations in France are integral sources of his copious memories. The commonality among such city-infused works is the reputation of said cities: world-renowned and possessed of their own symbolic capital and literary mythology. The associations are not always positive—writers often portray big cities as dirty, oppressive, even demonic—but the cities historically portrayed in literature are famed embodiments of grandeur and stature.
By AHMET HAMDI TANPİNAR
Translated by AYSEL K. BASCI
Piece appears below in English and the original Turkish.
Translator’s Note:
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962), a renowned 20th-century Turkish author, poet, essayist, intellectual, and educator, wrote two of the finest works in modern Turkish literature: The Time Regulation Institute and A Mind at Peace. In fellow Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech, he thanked Tanpınar for his considerable influence and inspiration as a literary icon.
The day of the moon landing, George and I planned to hunt for rocks. Jorge was his actual name, but he preferred to go by George, like The Beatles guitar man. We were going to look for samples just like the astronauts would.
I sprang out of bed and cranked the window open. Looking out between the twisting glass slats, I noticed the leaves of our lemon tree were still. I hoped it meant the rains would stay away, even though July afternoon downpours in Cuba were as regular as the blood orange sunsets.
After dressing to the sound of Mima’s clanging in the kitchen and the scent of coffee brewing, I sat at the dining table. I dipped a piece of stale Cuban bread into the café-con-leche she’d set there. “It needs sugar,” I said.
“You don’t need more sugar,” she said.
But I didn’t understand why. Sugar was the one thing on the island that wasn’t rationed.
I asked if she was going to my friend Raul’s house to watch the moon landing. His family had the only working television in the neighborhood.
“Maybe,” she said.
I’d dreamt about the moon landing even before I learned that the Americans were going to do it. Ever since I read Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a book George had given me, I’d been imagining a spaceship just like the one in the book: a long, narrow, bullet-like rocket, slicing through the heavens.
Mima wasn’t much of a reader. Not much of a dreamer either. I think that was why she’d never thought of leaving Cuba, even though everyone else seemed to be doing so.
“What are they looking for up there, anyway?” she said. “We have enough to worry about right here.”
By JIM WEBER
Dispatch crackles over the cruiser’s radio: brushfire on Ranch Road 580.
Frank lights a cigarette, takes a deep pull. His shift over, he listens, unobligated, as Latimer asks dispatch to confirm the fire’s location.
He stares through the windshield at his house, a squat brick ranch. Scuffed exterior and summer-fried lawn identical to the others on the block. The front window drapes are pulled back, giving the house a grin, like an old friend commiserating: Seven years left on your note, Frank. Three years short of retirement. Tough math.
I’ll sell the place when I retire, Frank thinks, not for the first time. Move to Kerrville, or Boerne, or Bandera. Find a part-time security job to help make ends meet. Latimer talks up New Mexico. Strikes Frank as too far from central Texas, too far from the remains of the life he and Lizzie shared before she passed.
Drapes back means his daughter Caitlyn is up and getting ready for work. Two weeks before she’s off to college in Austin. Who knows if she comes back? Live your entire life in a place, can come to hate it.
As our new year of publishing and programming picks up speed, we at The Common wanted to reflect on the pieces that made last year such a great one! We published over 200 pieces online and in print in 2023. Below, you can browse a list of the six most-read pieces of 2023 to see which stories, essays, and poems left an impact on readers.
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Two Poems from The Spring of Plagues by Ana Carolina Assis, translated by Heath Wing
“i wish I could / prevent your death / and bury your body alive / in the puny damp / earth
we tended / so that it kept on living / mandioca corn banana / would not sprout forth /
but instead / acerola cherry blackberry pitanga hog plum.”
January 2023 Poetry Feature, with work by Tina Cane, Myronn Hardy, and Marc Vincenz
“Sheila had IHOP delivered to her apartment in El Alto, NY / on January 6th
so she could kick back self-proclaimed terrorist / that she is and eat pancakes
while watching white supremacists / storm the Capital.”
Amherst, MA — The Common literary journal is pleased to announce its eighth award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The Arts Projects grant approved for 2024 is The Common’s largest NEA award to date and will support the journal in publishing and promoting place-based writing, fostering international connections, and expanding the audiences of emerging writers.
Leo Ríos speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Lencho,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio from the immigrant farmworker community. Leo talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores the friendship between two high school seniors in a rural community in California’s Central Valley. Leo also discusses his family’s generations-long history in farm labor, and how a class on reading poetry made him rethink prose writing on the sentence level.
By VINOD KUMAR SHUKLA
Translated from Hindi by ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA
Table of Contents:
I-5, California
I’ve driven up and down California via the Interstate-5 freeway countless times. There are many ways to find a way through its veins, but I am mostly familiar with the drive between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles or San Diego. I’ve lived a lot of life in and between these three major cities in California, and even at age 36, I am still learning to appreciate the distance between NorCal and SoCal, as well as the static landscapes that I have spent hours gazing at intently.
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