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Podcast: Mariah Rigg on “Target Island”

July 25, 2025 Audio, Issue 29, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

MARIAH RIGG speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her story “Target Island,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. “Target Island” is a story from her short story collection Extinction Capital of the World, out August 5 from Ecco; both focus on the islands of Hawai’i. Mariah talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the collection as a whole, and why reflecting contemporary Hawai’i is important to her work. Mariah also discusses playing with time and narrative flow in her stories, and working on a new project—her first novel.

The Reading Life: Re-Reading The Reader: Book Clubs, Reading Aloud, and the Many Faces of Aunt Betsy

July 22, 2025 Essays

By MARY JO SALTER

The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.

Whenever I’ve been asked to join a book club, I’ve given a stock answer: No thanks, my life is already a book club. As an English professor who had led class discussions about books for decades, I had acquired an arrogant persona: I was someone who told other people what to read, not the other way around. Yes, I was grateful for book recommendations by certain discerning friends. But any sort of public gathering in which everyone got a democratic turn to assign the others a book, however far it ranged from one’s own interests, and then most members had to pretend to enjoy the book more than they had, was my definition of a lousy party.

Main Character Syndrome: A Review of Stranger Than Fiction

July 21, 2025 Reviews

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

I picked up Stranger Than Fiction, Edwin Frank’s relay race through the twentieth century novel, immediately after rereading Madame Bovary, only to encounter Emma Bovary, who came into the literary world in 1856, in the first chapter.

Frank isn’t simply paying obligatory homage to Flaubert’s importance to the nineteenth-century novel. He’s pointing out the cinematic modernity of the famous agricultural fair scene which splices the full-of-himself aristocrat Rodolphe seducing Emma, the country doctor’s bored wife, with pompous local officials making speeches. He’s also showing that the nineteenth century novel, with its formidable, reality-affirming scenic machinery, was still in full flower when Fyodor Dostoevsky’s radical and baffling Notes from Underground, which Frank pegs as the first twentieth century novel, emerged barely a decade later. If the nineteenth-century novel “attempts to maintain a dynamic balance between the self and society,” the exterior world barely seems to exist for Dostoevsky’s narrator, whose mind churns through semantic and philosophical problems for much of the text. Yet, the book was anchored in reality—the political and social problems of Russia and the personal torment of its writer—in a new way.

What We’re Reading: July 2025

July 18, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

This July, ELIZABETH METZGER, NINA SEMCZUK, and SEÁN CARLSON bring you ruminations on what it feels like to return—to home, to memory, to oneself. As they make sense of their own lives through a poetry collection, novel, and essay collection, their recommendations invite us to contemplate what it means to exist within both change and stillness, and how time itself can wander and fragment.

Fanny Howe’s The Lyrics, recommended by Issue 24 Contributor Elizabeth Metzger

It’s early July, and I’m in the middle of moving back to the East Coast. Right now, a few days after the death of the poet Fanny Howe, I am reading her collection The Lyrics, on a screened porch in the late afternoon in the Berkshires, watching geese gather on a tiny red dock. I can hear the voices of parents across the pond teaching their children to fish, to let the fish go. I’m appreciating the element of air as I remember it from childhood, a sort of thickening all around me that feels wearable, welcoming, at times oppressive, a return to an old life from the other side.

The Common Announces 2025 Amazon Literary Partnership

July 17, 2025 News, News and Events

We at The Common are pleased to announce the receipt of our seventh award from the Amazon Literary Partnership’s Literary Magazine Fund.

Sisterland

July 16, 2025 Dispatches

By NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

Photo courtesy of author

Ithaca, NY

I want to start by saying that this is not about when I was in a New York city cab and the cabbie and I struck up a concrete jungle duet about where we were from—Gaza, Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Ukraine, India…—and what winds, fair or foul, had blown us to the country that’s being made great again by a certain real estate developer. I want to start by saying that in what I have to say there is no New York City or cabbie. That’s not the kind of story this is. Rather, in this story there is a sister—or sisters—and a land—or lands.

I want to start by saying that I propose, simply, a new topos for going “back home,” for the return to Ithaca. I call this topos Sisterland.

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

July 14, 2025 Interviews

Rosa Castellano (left) and Raychelle Heath (right)

RAYCHELLE HEATH (RH): Rosa, it is so lovely to meet you, and All is The Telling is such a beautiful read. The book is structurally interesting, and it’s inspiring on many different levels. The stories of different girls and women drew me in immediately. But, I want to start with the title. You’re telling a layered story here, and I’m curious how you arrived at the title. How does the title poem place the characters in the story arc of the book?

ROSA CASTELLANO (RC): I love this question! I hope that the collection’s title and the poem prepare readers for all of the telling that takes place in the book, which is largely concerned with telling stories and telling our truths, especially the stories we carry in our bodies. I subscribe to this idea of the layered self, like a series of paper dolls we can tug open to find a line of selves connecting who we are now, back to all the selves we’ve been, those previous identities that we hold. That’s how I’m hoping the poems in this collection work, linked together with various kinds of repeating patterns, working to tell the interconnected stories of a self. It’s a complicated thing, most days, to be an alive person.

Announcing The Common’s Sixth Literary Editorial Fellow

July 10, 2025 News and Events

(Amherst, Mass. July 10, 2025)—Award-winning, international literary journal The Common has announced Kei Lim ’25 as its sixth Literary Editorial Fellow. The fellowship launched in 2020 with support from the Whiting Foundation and is sustained by the generosity of Amherst College alumni donors.

The Literary Editorial Fellowship (LEF) was introduced with three goals in mind: to strengthen the bridge between The Common’s existing Literary Publishing Internship (LPI) for undergraduates and the professional publishing world; to provide real-world literary experience for an Amherst graduate, transferable to a wide range of fields; and to increase the capacity of The Common’s publishing and programming operations.

The Common Magazine Announces 2025-26 David Applefield ’78 Fellow

July 10, 2025 News, News and Events

(Amherst, Mass.) — Award-winning, international literary journal The Common announced today that Aidan Cooper ‘26 will be the third recipient of the David Applefield ’78 Fellowship. The fellowship, the magazine’s first endowed student internship, was established in 2022 by a group of friends and family of David Applefield, a literary polymath who attended Amherst College and founded Frank, an eclectic English-language literary magazine based in Paris.

The David Applefield ’78 Fellowship funds one student intern annually who possesses exceptional editorial and leadership skills to work alongside the magazine’s other student interns and magazine staff on editorial and promotional assignments. Among other responsibilities, the Applefield Fellow coordinates the Weekly Writes Accountability program, leads the Level I section of the Young Writers Program for high school students, and provides research and production support for podcasts. In addition, the Applefield Fellow trains and mentors other interns, and organizes events for the Amherst College community.

Aidan Cooper ‘26 enters the role following a year as an editorial assistant. They’re the acting President of Amherst College’s Poetry Club, Editor-in-Chief of The Lilac magazine, and a bearer of various literary positions around the college and beyond. They’re in the midst of many writing projects, from a research paper on early modern horsemanship and mercantilism begun at the Folger Shakespeare Library, to an English thesis on nothingness in avant-garde poetry.

Cooper thanks the more than fifty friends, classmates, and family members of David Applefield who contributed to the fellowship fund for their generosity and trust, as well as the magazine’s staff for their mentorship. “The Common, through its mission and care, champions such a worldly and passionate writing community,” Cooper said, “and I’m so thankful to immerse myself in it.”

Patricia

July 8, 2025 Fiction

By ISSA QUINCY

This piece is excerpted from Absence, out now from Granta (UK), and forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio (US) on July 15, 2025.

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there is a painting by Hendrick Avercamp, the mute of Kampen, hung on a deadening grey felt and squeezed in amid other Dutch masters. One’s initial glance at the painting will see it reveal little more than a benign winter scene. However, when you look at Avercamp’s painting closely you begin to notice the close detailing of the variance of life. There in the painting exists death, pleasure, ecstasy, frivolity, poverty and secrecy, closely exacted alongside other states of being and non-being all perceived by Avercamp from a heightened position, a vantage point for an incorporeal observer; a drifting onlooker that watches and takes in the immediate while the rest of the yellow-grey land and sky disperse outwards into misty incomprehensibility. What is presented is the sight of the intangible spectator that sees what is in front of him, recognizes everything and curtails his judgement of anything.