Event Date:
Saturday, September 28, 2013 (All day)
Location:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Conversations & Connections Writers’ Conference in Philadelphia
July 22, 2013
News and Events
All posts tagged: 2013
Boston Book Festival
July 19, 2013
News and Events
Event Date:
Saturday, October 19, 2013 (All day)
Location:
Copley Square, Boston, MA
The Common will be attending the Boston Book Festival in October! Come see us there.
The Boston Book Festival is New England’s largest annual literary event. 2012’s Boston Book Festival featured more than 125 presenters and dozens of sessions for kids and adults,. The BBF also boasted a bustling street fair, workshops for aspiring authors, an outdoor music stage, and more! For more info on this year’s event, see www.bostonbookfest.org
Image of the cast of The Wire, from “The Art of the Wire,” the opening event of last year’s Boston Book Festival. Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons user bradalmanac.
Brooklyn Book Festival: Book Fair
July 19, 2013
News and Events
Event Date:
Sunday, September 22, 2013 (All day)
Location:
Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza, 209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn NY 11201
Provincetown
July 17, 2013
Dispatches
I can only assume that Stellwagen Bank is a financial institution. Perhaps a progressive Norwegian firm with a board of directors that is, by law, at least fifty percent women. The kind of bank that would sponsor a football club in Trondheim and a chain of internet cafés in Toronto, as well as a tour of the National Marine Sanctuary from Provincetown’s MacMillan Wharf. A global thought leader. A benevolent presence at Davos.
Interpreted for Viewing
July 12, 2013
Studio
Artist: JEREMIAH DINE
Curated by Jeff Bergman
Jeremiah Dine records moments of brisk movement, still unreflective silence, and unstinting labor with equanimity. The images that sit obligingly still now are the distillation of activity by the artist and the subject. Dine uses his lens to interpret the field of view and render the whole image from minute elements linked by chance and purpose. Each fragment flattens, and what is left becomes the single instance worthy of illumination. Each image is now interpreted for viewing as RAW file. In the past, the practice of printing an image signaled a work’s finality. With Dine and many other contemporary photographers, an image’s final state can be digital—it need not be printed and exhibited. Of thousands of images and the wide range of themes that Jeremiah Dine records, certainly not all could be reviewed in one exhibition. These images were chosen because they exemplify a single moment of candid street photography.
I Bring My Father News of the Road
July 10, 2013
Dispatches
Four days a week, I drive the fifty miles between Omaha and Lincoln on Interstate 80, a line of pavement that stretches across the entire country, from Teaneck, New Jersey, to San Francisco. In Nebraska, the interstate follows the old Oregon Trail the early settlers bumped along in their horse-drawn wagons filled with household goods that shifted and creaked as wheels churned over the uneven ground.
Swimming, In Two Parts
Pools
1.
Washington, D.C., summers have been hot since forever, so a place to swim is a necessity, not a luxury. In the 1950s and 1960s, no one had air conditioning at home, and the Potomac River was so polluted that a tetanus shot was advised if you fell in. We lived in Southeast when I was little, and my parents would drive across town to Georgetown, the rich part of the city, to the public pool. My mother says I would throw myself in if she took her hand off me; she was constantly thanking people for rescuing the baby.
Summer Love: Ice Cream and Its Many Contents
July 5, 2013
Essays
In a country so hot, and with such sugar hunger, you’d think the frozen dairy dessert field in Abu Dhabi would be crowded. But the United Arab Emirates is a relatively new country, with few home-grown stores, so imported chocolates and native dates dominate the sweet shops. When it comes to ice cream, a dozen kinds of Baskin Robbins is all there is. In grocery stores, there’s Häagen–Dazs too, but it’s the jagged, sickly pink BR that dominates each and every city superblock, including one on the ground floor of our Abu Dhabi apartment building—right next to the ATM.
SAR Talk
July 3, 2013
Dispatches
By JEFF MUSE
When I arrived for my shift, I heard talk of a search and rescue near the south end of the Ptarmigan Traverse: two climbers, stuck on an 18-inch ledge. They dropped their rope and most of their camping gear while summiting 8,200-foot Spire Point, the remote tail of the route, a spot between Sentinel and Dome peaks that most people reach only after several days of route finding. It’s fearsome, storm-wracked country — the Pacific Crest, where waters spill east toward the Columbia River or west to Puget Sound. And if you get high enough, your cell phone might work, as it did for those climbers this morning. They called 911, who in turn called us, the Park Service.
Writing at War: An Interview with Masha Hamilton
July 2, 2013
Interviews
MELODY NIXON interviews MASHA HAMILTON
Last month Masha Hamilton published her fifth novel, What Changes Everything, while working around the clock as the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Against a background of suicide bomb attacks and early Fourth of July celebrations in Kabul, Masha talked to Melody Nixon long-distance about Afghanistan, storytelling as a human right, and the delicate act of writing in a war zone.
*
Melody Nixon (MN): Can you describe to me what is outside your window right now?
Masha Hamilton (MH): It’s nighttime here, it’s dark. Outside my window there’s a big tent where we’ll be gathered tomorrow with our Afghan colleagues, and partners, to mark an early Independence Day. Now it’s fairly quiet, but sometimes I do hear helicopters flying low overhead. There’s not a lot of green on the compound, but right outside my window there is a bit of lawn, which I’m very grateful for. In the distance you can see the beginnings of the Hindu Kush mountain range, beyond Kabul.
