The Daily Hampshire Gazette explores The Common‘s ties to a larger literary tradition at Amherst College and asks: is launching a print magazine in 2011 “swimming against the tide?” Maybe. But editor Jennifer Acker has faith.
The Amherst Bulletin explores The Common‘s origins as a print journal, as well as its relationship with Amherst College.
Inside Higher Ed heralds the launch of The Common, describing our mission, our roots in Amherst College’s rich literary tradition, and our crucial ties to UMass-Amherst and other local institutions.
The Chronicle of Higher Education runs an in-depth Q&A with editor Jennifer Acker that describes why we’re uncommon, the inner workings of the journal, and how we’ll negotiate print and digital publishing.
Event Date:
Thursday, April 28, 2011 – 8:00 pm
Location:
Alumni House, Amherst College
Come celebrate the release of our first issue! Join us at Amherst College’s Alumni House on April 28th for drinks, music and brief readings by contributors Sabina Murray and Yehudit Ben-Zvi Heller. The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 8:00 p.m. Click here for a map of the Amherst College campus.
By HOLLIE HARDY
First you have to have hair. This trend toward baldness negates the problem.
Once you have grown a luscious mane, gather images on your lion tongue: ripe peaches, sizzle of bacon, crisp campfire scent of an almost winter night, handful of rain or feathers or marbles, the details of sunset, and and fast cars. Weave your materials carefully. Remember that birds like shiny things. The colors and flavors you choose may affect the type of bird you lure into your hair-nest.
By LAUREN GROFF
Once upon a time, I believed that writing was the same thing as being a writer. This was before I understood that scribbling a messy sentence in a notebook was not actual writing, a time when I bought gamely into the self-sparked romance of becoming a writer: a life of moonlit walks beside rivers, bare apartments dancing with light, foreign languages drifting through a window full of geraniums. Being a writer meant being somewhere else, anywhere that promised architecture and meaningful encounters with sophisticated natives and a chilly, ascetic version of me pinned like an anchorite to my pages. I knew I could never be a writer in the place where I was born, small, cold Cooperstown with its mysterious lake. Laughable idea, that!
Book by TÉA OBREHT
Reviewed by
For most of us, the war and subsequent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s conjures memories of shaky news footage and the echoes of faraway landmine explosions. For the narrator of The Tiger’s Wife, a young doctor who grew up during the seemingly endless violence, those years were her childhood, defined not by what was lost, but by the simple ritual she shared with her grandfather: visiting the tiger at the zoo.
Author Téa Obreht infuses her first novel with everydayness, what people who haven’t lived through a war might call survival. The novel opens in the present with the news of Natalia’s grandfather’s sudden death. On her way to an aid mission at an orphanage across the border, Natalia receives a page from her grandmother with the news, and an accusation: “He was going to meet you.” But Natalia hadn’t heard from him and didn’t know anything about the supposed plan to meet, so the news comes as a double loss—grief, confusion, and a sense of betrayal. Where was her grandfather going and why did he lie?
Event Date:
Thursday, March 31st, 2011 – 8:00 pm
Location:
Amherst, MA
Issue 01 of The Common ships to subscribers.
I grew up in a suburb. Sub-: substitute, subservient, suboptimal, subordinate, substandard. Suburb: aesthetically, morally, culturally beneath the urb. Suburb: lesser than, not quite, almost, near but far. Suburb: the middle sibling of American municipalities, the generic neighborhood, where sidewalks and landscaped parks abound, where street widths reflect the dimensions of the average minivan, where children wander through barometrically-controlled environments, ogling the mass-produced outfits from The Limited and The Gap, concocting fantasies about their future, properly-attired selves, when they will no longer dwell in such a substandard place, but will graduate to the real life, the unsubordinate life: the life of the city, the life of the urb.
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