Once again, The Common will keep a table at this year’s Juniper festival. Enjoy the journal and press fair, and a keynote reading by James Tate.
Visit the Kelly Writers House at UPenn for a rousing discussion on writing about place. The conversation will be streamed live here.
On Sunday, on the side of a rural ridge path that cut through fields of maize and newly planted papaya trees, I watched a man kill a venomous adder. He threw large rocks to stun the snake, and then used his heel to crush its head. Even after he stopped, the snake’s body kept moving, dragging its destroyed head behind it.
Book by JIM SHEPARD
Reviewed by
Sometimes, after finishing a particularly impactful book, I experience a partial paralysis. It’s a sort of ecstatic exhaustion, I think; I’ve felt similarly after long, intense runs. If there is a window nearby, I’ll stare out it without really noticing anything in particular. If my chair is capable of rocking, I’ll do so steadily and rhythmically to the point where people sitting nearby will clear their throats in my general direction. I will occasionally mutter an expletive over and over under my breath. I don’t deny that all this is sort of dramatic. In my own defense, it doesn’t happen that often, and it requires a fairly momentous reading experience. Again, this happens usually after finishing a book. It seems significant, then, that I felt emotionally KO-ed after nearly every story in Jim Shepard’s new collection of short fiction, You Think That’s Bad. The equivalent would perhaps be getting picked up by the same girl eleven times in a row despite having your heart broken every single time. And being ready to be picked up again, if she ever comes back.
The National Guard is on patrol
in combat boots and GI Joe camouflage,
M16’s slung down to their hips,
young as boys on Halloween,
ready for anything, and I want
to hand every one of them a bag of candy.
My parents used to have a grey miniature schnauzer named Jacques. While his brother Pablo was big and black and thick, Jacques was wiry and small. Over the years, his runtiness and Pablo’s brotherly abuse (stealing food, mounting his haunches) made him kind of squirrely. If he had been a human he would have been diagnosed and put on medication, but Jacques was only a dog, and so he was allowed to lead his neurotic, pampered life.
By DELIA VELASQUEZ and JULIA LICHTBLAU
I met Delia Velasquez in the late 1990s through her daughter, Ericka Rubin, who was a friend of our babysitter. My daughter, Zoë, and son, Gabriel, were adopted from Guatemala, and she and her husband, Alberto, both from Guatemala, were curious to meet us. They had three sons, and we became friends. One blistering July day in 2005, I brought Gabriel over to play. Ericka, Doña Delia, and I sat in their Brooklyn kitchen, talking and cooking, and the subject of marriage came up. I mentioned my grandmother was married at fourteen.
Playa d’Oro
The canopy above ajerk with toucans
ajerk with toucan, and no,
you can’t eat them,
so sorry.
Book by BINYAVANGA WAINAINA
Reviewed by
In May of 1945, legendary Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins wrote to a young soldier serving overseas. The enlisted man had sent Perkins a short story and asked for advice about pursuing a writing career. Perkins was gently encouraging, urging the young man to take his time distilling his war experiences into fiction. By way of instruction and inspiration, he tells of visiting his author and friend Ernest Hemingway in Key West. “We went fishing every day in those many-colored waters, and then also in the deep-blue Gulf Stream. It was all completely new to me, and wonderfully interesting—there was so much to know that nobody would ever have suspected, about even fishing. I said to Hemingway, ‘Why don’t you write about all this?’”
Hemingway replied, “I will in time, but I couldn’t do it yet.” Pointing to a pelican Perkins recalls as “clumsily flapping along,” the author added, “See that pelican? I don’t know yet what his part is in the scheme of things.”
LINDSAY STERN interviews TERESA VILLEGAS
The Common contributor Teresa Villegas and intern Lindsay Stern discuss Villegas’ recent projects, her choice of medium, and the influence of place and the environment on her work. Released in October, Issue 02 features a selection from “El mundo al revés/The World Upside Down,” a suite of 10 prints by Villegas alongside bilingual folktales by Ilan Stavans.
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Celebrating 15 Years