News & Events | Page 256 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

In Court

August 10, 2013 Essays

My mother walked toward the courthouse at her usual fast clip, and the smoke from her Marlboro hung over her head. My brother Bernard and I trailed her as we crossed Church Street, and the fall leaves, mostly auburn and pumpkin, crunched under our feet. Everything else around us was so still.

Three weeks before, Mom had called me in the middle of the night to tell me that Bernard had been arrested. After we got off the phone, I wasn’t sure what to do. Even though Bernard was eighteen years old, only six years younger than I was, I had taken care of him his whole life. I had enjoyed his victories––homeruns and high scores––as if they were my own. I was sure his mistakes were mine, too.

From Place to Place: The Portrait Photography of Lauri Lyons

August 9, 2013 Studio

Artist: LAURI LYONS

Curated by Alicia Lubowski-Jahn

Although the photographer Lauri Lyons calls New York home, she is ever on the move through her creative projects. Her current body of work spans Africa, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and the United States, and has connected the globe through African diaspora and identity formation themes. Often pictures and languages within her portrait photography evoke origins that are both ancestral and geographic. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the photojournalism magazine NOMADS, which is also dedicated to the peripatetic state.

Brooklyn Book Festival: ABC Trivia

August 8, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Wednesday, September 18, 2013 – 7:00pm

Location:

61 Local

CLMP & Huffington Post Books present ABC Trivia, co-hosted by One Story & Tin House, sponsored by The Common. Join us at 61 Local for a fun-filled evening of facts and prizes!

Image of craft beers at 61 Local via Flick Creative Commons user DowntownTraveler.com

Clinging to a Tree on Christmas

August 7, 2013 Dispatches

By BRICE PARTICELLI

I’m forty feet above the ground hanging, onto a palm frond for my life, and Batiota wants me to go higher. He motions for me to take my foot from the palm’s trunk and place it on the fronds above. I hesitate and give him a look that must be something between, What am I doing up here? and Why are you trying to kill me? Palm fronds grow green from the top, but whither and fall from below, so all I can see to step on is a dying frond, connected by nothing more than a thin, brown-red scar.

Amy Brill on Fires in Nantucket, 19th-Century Sexuality, and the First Female Astronomer

August 6, 2013 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews AMY BRILL

Amy Brill’s articles, essays, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Redbook, Real Simple, Salon, Guernica, and Time Out New York, among many others. Her debut novel The Movement of the Stars was published by Riverhead Books in April. This month she chatted with S. Tremaine Nelson about the island of Nantucket, historical fiction, and the first American female astronomer, Maria Mitchell, who shares characteristics with Hannah Price, the heroine of Brill’s novel.

S. Tremaine Nelson (SN): You were raised in New York City. Do you identify with a particular hometown neighborhood?

Amy Brill (AB): I strongly identify with the neighborhood I grew up in, Corona, Queens. It was like living in a mini UN, and it was the place I learned how to talk to anyone.

SN: What was the first book that made you say “wow!” out loud?

AB: I can’t remember the name — I was probably in third or fourth grade, and it was a YA book in which a young boy’s friend had died; I vaguely recall it being a case of playing on the train tracks, falling or being hit. What I do remember, vividly, is the gut-punch of the scene, how visceral my sorrow was for this fictional boy and his lost friend. It was the first time a book made me cry.

Tess Taylor’s “The Forage House”

August 5, 2013 Interviews, Podcasts & Audio

DIANA BABINEAU interviews TESS TAYLOR

Today we celebrate the publication of Tess Taylor’s The Forage House with two new poems from her debut collection (“Official History”, “Southampton County Will 1745”), complete with audio recordings. In the following interview with Diana Babineau, Taylor talks about personal ancestry, American roots, and slavery, as she attempts to uncover what remains of a broken past.

Hooverville

August 2, 2013 Essays

By SAHIBA GILL

Over the past forty years, Industrial Realty Group has acquired over a billion dollars of America’s obsolete industrial complexes, former military bases, and corporate campuses for retrofitting, conversion, and privatization. In 2007, the firm acquired the newly closed Hoover Plant, two blocks from my high school. Hoover once made the world’s most famous vacuums, and its old headquarters are still tremendous, a magnificent crowd of red brick and white windowpanes that run along a green lawn and announce themselves in white letters, “The Home of Hoover Fine Appliances.”

Deluge

July 31, 2013 Dispatches

By KEANE SHUM

I got caught in a deluge the other night, and when it hit me, it hit me just like that, italicized, like the rain was coming down so hard even the words to describe it were soaked and falling to the ground. I was in the back streets of Sheung Wan, an old part of town on the outskirts of Central that rests against the side of a hill. Steep stone staircases run up and down and through the area, and on a sunny Sunday morning you can play snakes and ladders with the past, sliding down to a street of antique stores that sell Bruce Lee posters from the 60s and twin-lens reflex cameras from the 30s, or climbing up to peek inside the few Edwardian mansions that remain, the once proud homes not of colonial officials, but of the Chinese compradors who even then—or maybe especially then—had a thing about putting the white man in his place.

Burn Everything

July 30, 2013 Essays

By BARRETT WARNER

Speaking of Southern Illinois and fishing and smoking cigars and praying when you don’t believe in anything, I got a call last week from my neighbor Larry who was having a porn barbecue. “Every year is a gift,” he told me, when he turned thirty-four. That was forty years ago. He was always convinced he’d die young, or die middle-aged, or die a few weeks after he retired. He’d more or less been planning on it forever. In the past five years he’d sold his books. He’d sold his collection of toy figures. He’d burned most of his poems. “Nothing I can do about the published ones,” he’d said. “That’s my own little punishment from God.”

Review: River Inside the River

July 29, 2013 Reviews

Book by GREGORY ORR
Reviewed by PATRICK MEIGHAN

Gregory Orr is a meditative poet. In his new book, River Inside the River, Orr again turns his inner eye to the power of words to reveal the essence of a thing, a movement, an emotion. He writes:

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures.

River Inside the River is a sequel to and extension of his 2005 collection Concerning the Book That is the Body of the Beloved. This is especially true in the third section, which bears the book’s title.