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Chanel

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

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.

March 2014 Poetry Feature

March 23, 2014 Poetry

Celebrate the advent of spring with new poems by seven of our spectacular contributors.

Memory of Cold and Wind

March 19, 2014 Dispatches

By ANNA HOGELAND

His friends ask us why we’d go to Liverpool. We don’t have an answer to give them and I forget the true one. We look at each other, shrug and say we’d heard it’s the most romantic city in the world.

Providence

March 18, 2014 Essays

By MARIAN CROTTY

On the last day of the conference, we take a short bus ride to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a sleepy town in the Blackstone Valley, just south of the Massachusetts state line. Situated along the Blackstone River and close to the Eastern Seaboard, the area was at the forefront of early American industry, powered first by water and later by steam. Today, a bright winter afternoon in February, snow melting underneath a clear uncurtained sky, the town center of slow-moving traffic and brick storefronts fringed with weathered canvas awnings has the distilled reverie of an elegy.

A Month on the Edge of the Caspian Sea

March 12, 2014 Dispatches

By TIMOTHY KENNY

Baku is a city intent on reinventing itself block by steady block. Apartment high-rises and office buildings from the Soviet ‘70s — pock-marked and stained gray by pollution — are transformed in white stone at a frightening pace. Baku today reminds me more of Vienna or Zagreb than a former Soviet republic that clings to the edge of the Caspian Sea.