2011 | Page 9 | The Common

The Woods Behind the Palace Park

August 3, 2011 Dispatches

There is a palace in a tiny rural village two hours west of Warsaw, with an orange mansard roof, two spired towers, and a park stretching beyond it. It is strange to think that in the 1940s, when war was grinding Poland into the ground, the palace still belonged to the prominent Radziwiłł family, who shared it with Nazis while members of the underground Home Army, villagers, hid in the woods behind the palace park. Here, planes dropped packages into a clearing among alders, cherries, and pines. They’d drop food or weapons, which the villagers distributed or took to Warsaw, and sometimes they’d drop men.

Finding Faulkner

July 27, 2011 Dispatches

By GREGORY CURTIS

Today’s dispatch from Gregory Curtis was originally posted on The Mailer Fellowship Blog, which features essays from students and teachers at the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Curtis is a mentor to the Colony’s non-fiction fellows.

I like visiting writers’ houses. You see the spaces that enveloped their imagination day by day. You see the furniture they sat in and the paintings and photographs on the walls. You see the dishes in the kitchen. You see the books on their shelves and the bed they slept in. It’s possible to assume too much from all this, but what’s the point of going at all if you don’t make some conclusions from what you see?

Review: So Good in Black

July 19, 2011 Reviews

Book by SUNETRA GUPTA
Reviewed by JENN MAR

So Good in Black

In Sunetra Gupta’s So Good in Black, the devil is a fashionable industrialist with a seaside villa in Bengal, and he’s guilty not of any overtly malicious crime, but of donating milk to children. Incredible as it may seem, evil in this novel is not made of sulfur and coals, but of institutionalized power driving the market of ethics. It’s this market of ethics, or ethical imperialism, that Gupta explores in her fifth novel, a novel that unfolds with heated conversations, and dialogue resembling philosophical debates.

The premise guiding these debates is just as sinuous as the devil himself. American travel writer Max Gate returns to Calcutta to attend a woman’s funeral, and like all travelers returning to a destination after so many years of misery, Gate experiences a heightened sense of wonder, and chill, towards the landscape so inextricably tied to his memories. As he surveys the beach, following a shadowy figure along the seashore, the daughter of a woman from his formative years, Gate delivers an incantation to the past: “Child on the seashore, I loved your mother once.

Birds of Iowa City

July 15, 2011 Dispatches

By ANNA NORTH

I killed a bird in Iowa City. It was lying, dying, on the concrete steps that led to my apartment, a basement lair whose drains sometimes backed up and belched black ooze everywhere. The bird was gasping and twitching and its eyes were shut very tight. It was a titmouse. I stepped over it and went inside.

I tried to work, but I kept thinking about the bird. I decided to call my mom, who lived far away, and ask for her advice.

Coming Home to London

July 13, 2011 Dispatches

By ROLAND KELTS

I was looking for a light blue raincoat. The bulbs were dim and the ceilings low. At Heathrow Airport’s Passport Control Center, the line of my fellow arrivals amassed in clumps, passengers slouching and scratching away the hours of cramped flight, fingering their cell phones and sleepily eyeing watches. There were browns, blues and starched whites—sweaters, jerseys, overcoats and t-shirts. But no light blues. Not a raincoat in sight.

Review: Not Now, Voyager

July 12, 2011 Reviews

Book by LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ
Reviewed by HANNAH GERSEN

Not Now, Voyager

Travel poses a particular seduction to writers, especially writers between projects, which Lynne Sharon Schwartz admits was her predicament when she began Not Now, Voyager. After completing her novel, The Writing on the Wall, which dealt with post 9/11 New York City, Schwartz wanted a retreat from American politics. An easy solution was to leave the country. But Schwartz didn’t want to go elsewhere in search of inspiration. For Schwartz, travel is “a distraction from writing—from living,” and often leaves her feeling bereft. During travel, Schwartz writes, “Most of me seems to have remained at home, or dormant, or in a state of suspended animation….” Her attitude, she realized, was unusual, or at least not one championed in a culture of rapid globalization. Not Now, Voyager was conceived as an antidote to this, and how much it succeeds as such depends on how much you enjoy wandering around Schwartz’s mind.

Lost Histories

July 6, 2011 Dispatches

By KITTY HOFFMAN

I already know Gaudi’s phantasmagoria: the commissioned houses that curve like ocean waves or flash in the sun as though they were covered in fish scales, the Art Deco-Gothic cathedral spires that replicate eternity via never-ending construction, the public park that simulates an underwater landscape. I already know the urban legend that Walt Disney, after spending time here as a young man, would forever replicate the fanciful stone gargoyles, arches and spires of the Barri Gotic in his cartoon worlds, and in the Fantasyland of his first theme park in California.

Brooklyn Reading

July 5, 2011 News and Events

Event Date:

Wednesday, August 17, 2011 – 7:00pm

Location:

Rocky Sullivan’s

We’re hosting a reading on August 17th at Rocky Sullivan’s (Brooklyn, NY). Come and enjoy an evening featuring readings by Brook Willensky-Lanford, Maura Candela, and Maria Terrone. The event starts at 7 PM and is free and open to the public.

The Boston Globe (2011)

July 3, 2011 News and Events

The Boston Globe features The Common in “Read Local,” a piece that compares the magazine to farmers’ markets.

After a Fall

June 29, 2011 Dispatches

By GAIL FOLKINS

The white horse at the railing stood alone, saddled and loose with no rider on his back. I searched for a person in charge, someone holding the reins and hidden from view behind the horse, but the gelding in the outdoor riding arena faced the morning clouds by himself.

All posts tagged: 2011

The Woods Behind the Palace Park

Finding Faulkner

Review: So Good in Black

Birds of Iowa City

Coming Home to London

Review: Not Now, Voyager

Lost Histories

Brooklyn Reading

The Boston Globe (2011)

After a Fall

Bid on a personalized postcard from your favorite author in our Author Postcard Auction, now till Dec. 2!