A panel discussion in Amherst College’s Frost Library with editors for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and Vanity Fair, moderated by Jen Acker. The event takes place as part of Amherst College’s series, “The Future of the Humanities in the Age of Technics.”
Dickens in Paris
We had no plans to visit Paris that winter. I was at the end of the second trimester of a difficult first pregnancy, when a few hours away from the comfort of home were all my hundred-pound body could afford. We were living in Salem, Virginia, five thousand miles from all our family in India.
October 8 – The Dow Closes Up 11006
3 things were called into the somehow of morning
two dissimilar metals + moisture = electricity
and me here dimmed, all yesterday I wrote
Editor’s Corner: A Conversation with Hannah Tinti
JEFFREY CONDRAN interviews HANNAH TINTI
Photo by Linda Carrion
Periodically, The Common will feature conversations with editors that illuminate the wide-ranging nature of their work and their creative lives. In today’s piece, Jeffrey Condran talks with One Story editor Hannah Tinti about the writer/editor relationship, The Good Thief, and the relevance of digital tools to the literary community.
The DMZ Sanctuary
By LYNNE WEISS
Some say it’s the most dangerous place in the world, but that might depend on your species. Surrounded by barbed wire, minefields, and soldiers, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea seems anything but, yet this strip of land a couple of miles wide and about a 160 miles long is a safe and peaceful haven for plants and animals. There has been almost no human activity within it for over 50 years.
Boston Book Festival
Look for The Common at the Boston Book Festival. We will be sharing a table with Harvard Review!
The Cabin
In 1964, as a kind of recompense for, or salvation from, moving us to the treeless, waterless plains of Minnesota, my parents joined with Henry, my mother’s brother, in the purchase of a cabin in northern Michigan, and for seven summers thereafter we escaped. It was three months of heaven after nine months of hell. I remember it, vividly; the memories are icons, glassed-in and shimmering like relics of the Church.
The Flower Bar
Shuji Kawashima stood at the door of his Tokyo flower shop, bowing at a three-quarter angle with sharp, reflexive motions to a female customer who returned the gesture. She backed out into the street, clutching a sheaf of flowers wrapped in heavy cellophane. Kawashima reentered the shop, edged his way past a workbench, and ducked behind an impromptu counter. Peering out from behind a row of tall vases topped with multi-colored roses, he reached for a wine bottle and began pouring drinks.
Lit Mag Fair at Newtonville Books
A celebration of local literary magazines, including Agni, Ploughshares, Post Road, Redivider, The Common, and The Harvard Review. Katia Kapovich, author of the short story “The Smuggler” to appear in our upcoming Issue 02, will be reading!
In the West
I remember how the air smelled, of eucalyptus and the Pacific. I was sitting under green corrugated fiberglass panels in an open-air classroom a mile from Santa Monica beach when President Kennedy got shot in the head and neck. Dallas was my hometown, and I started fourth grade back at the scene of that crime. A year later, we moved again, this time to New Hampshire.