setting sun, splayed
elegant
as fresh catch—
Still Life with Eel Grass, Sand
October 2, 2013
Dispatches
On Burning Your Own Books and Bashing Off the Track: An Interview with Carrie Tiffany
October 1, 2013
Interviews
MELODY NIXON interviews CARRIE TIFFANY
Carrie Tiffany is an Australian writer and author of the novels Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2005, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction), and Mateship with Birds (2012, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction, winner of the Stella Prize), as well as several short stories. Born in England, Tiffany’s work draws on the complexities of the British migrant experience in the antipodes. Tiffany talked with fellow antipodean Melody Nixon last week, on a call from Canada where Tiffany is currently teaching creative writing at The Banff Center.
Boys with a Synth
October 1, 2013
Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays
I went to buy the Roland Juno-6 with my best friend Michael the summer I was sixteen, before either one of us had a driver’s license. Other boys saved their house-painting money and bought an electric guitar with a starter amp. Or a five-piece drum kit, if they had the kind of parents who tolerated an unholy racket in the basement. Michael and I had earned eight dollars an hour for two weeks to stain a cottage on the Cape, a mythic payday that had sent us whooping and hollering into the waves, and I wanted to buy a synthesizer with my share of the windfall.
Lab of Literary Architecture
By SCOTT GEIGER
Last month I enjoyed following media coverage of an unusual writing workshop and design studio held at Columbia University. Italian architect and writer Matteo Pericoli originated his “Laboratory of Literary Architecture” course in Turin, and brought it to New York this spring as a joint course for students of the School of Writing and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Slack Water
September 25, 2013
Dispatches
By HANNAH GERSEN
We show up at Mayflower Beach at ten one August morning, and the parking attendant, a tanned teenaged girl in a gold tee shirt, tells us we’re too late, the lot is full. To ensure a spot, it’s best to come around 8:00 a.m., or even earlier.
A Geography of Hurt
September 24, 2013
Essays
September 2013 Poetry Feature
September 23, 2013
Poetry
This month we are featuring eight new poems by four The Common contributors:
Review: The Virgins
September 23, 2013
Reviews
Book by PAMELA ERENS
Reviewed by
The prep-school novel has never grabbed me. Maybe it’s because I’m a Californian who didn’t go to an exclusive New England boarding school or send my children to one. Maybe it’s because these novels (yes, you, A Separate Peace, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Prep, A Starboard Sea, and all the Harry Potter books, not to mention The Dead Poet’s Society, even though it’s a movie)—seem precious and predictable portraits of a cossetted (albeit often deadly) social niche.
The Virgins, however, is different. This elegant new novel by Pamela Erens (who attended Phillips Exeter) defies niche or genre. It is indeed set in an East Coast boarding school, and this setting plays a large role, but Erens does so many more interesting things than the usual exploration of class and teen angst, not least the creation of an utterly original female protagonist, the spiky, seductive, cringe-producing Aviva Rossner, whose aggressively Jewish name alone invokes a knowing frisson as soon as it appears. In the very next sentence, the narrator, another student, announces his name: Bruce Bennett-Jones. Erens has already subverted our expectations.We just don’t know it yet.
The Bridge
September 18, 2013
Dispatches
By CHRIS KELSEY
The first time I visited Copenhagen I decided to quit my job. I had spent five years working nearly 60 hours per week as an editor, I never took vacation, I was struggling with finances, and I was deeply unhappy. My parents, who were closing in on retirement, had been to Ireland not long before and the travel bug for Europe had struck. Now they chose Denmark. To my good fortune, they treated their three adult children to this August trip.
Chatham Rock
September 17, 2013
Essays
For a gardener, geology is destiny. My little bit of earth is in a town surrounded on three sides by water. Chatham, New Jersey, sits at an elbow of the Passaic River that forms its northern and eastern boundaries. To the south, the so-called Great Swamp soaks vast acreage. Yet for all of its perimeter liquid, the town is built on rock.
