2013 | Page 3 | The Common

Review: Kicking the Sky

November 18, 2013 Reviews

Book by ANTHONY DE SA
Reviewed by ESMERALDA CABRAL

Kicking the Sky

Being Portuguese and Canadian, I’m always looking for literature about the Portuguese immigrant experience in North America. So I eagerly anticipated the acclaimed Canadian writer Anthony de Sa’s new novel, Kicking the Sky, which weaves the fictional lives of several families in the Portuguese immigrant community in Toronto with a particularly gruesome true crime story.

De Sa has emerged as one of the important literary voices of the Portuguese Diaspora. His first book, Barnacle Love, a series of related stories about Portuguese immigrant history, was short-listed for Canada’s prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2008.

The Big Mac Buddha

November 13, 2013 Dispatches

By IRA SUKRUNGRUANG

What I notice immediately—after the stifling heat, the humidity that fogs glass, the stray dogs—are the temples. They are part of the Thai landscape, like the rubber trees, the wild green jungles, the red mountains of the north. Each temple is unlike the other, constructed by the community’s money and faith and devotion. According to a count done in 2004, there are well over 40,000 Buddhist temples in Thailand, 40,000 temples in a country that can fit into Texas.

Well-Armed

November 13, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

By ROWAN MOORE GERETY

A few months before I moved in, Serge was sitting in his house cleaning an AK-47 when it went off in his lap. Looking down, he found his hands were still intact, and he decided then and there to stop selling weapons. On the French mainland, he’d gone to school for aitiopathy, a form of physical therapy that seeks to provide treatment without pain. Down the line, he still looked forward to opening a private practice; gun running wasn’t worth the risk of losing any fingers. Eventually, Serge’s friends would tell me about his arsenal, though I never saw it myself. Each of them had seen a weapon at his house, and they realized, comparing notes, that the individual guns they’d seen were all different. In fact, Serge seemed to have a very large collection.

Ten Thousand Walks by the Little Pamet River

November 12, 2013 Essays

By BRENDAN GALVIN

Walking will solve it.

— Roman Proverb

Spring and fall, winter and summer for more than half my life, I have gone out walking almost daily on a road that edges a vast Cape Cod salt marsh. This loosens things up before I sit down with my notebook. A stream meanders through the marsh, and where it parallels the road I walk beside it, out to a bay beach parking lot, then down the strand a half mile or so to a stone jetty, one of two that keeps the tide- and wind-mauled sands from closing the entrance to the harbor.

Domestic Apocalypse

November 11, 2013 In House, Poetry

By JAMES ALAN GILL

Photo by Flickr Creative Commons user Jonathan D. Blundell

Strange to go back

To the house I’d left

Eight months before.

Empty now, sold

Short, short-sale, mortgage

Underwater, upsidedown.

Issue 06 Launch Party and Trivia Night

November 8, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, November 21, 2013 – 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Location:

The High Horse

Join us at The High Horse to celebrate the launch of The Common Issue 06 with a night of games and trivia about locations and languages featured in the issue. Compete in groups to win epic prizes! All are welcome!

Reprint: Travel Writing in the Twitter Age from Hippo Reads

November 8, 2013 Essays

By SARAH TORY

Six months ago, Paul Salopek walked out of Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, heading northwest across the parched expanse of the Great Rift Valley. He will be walking for the next seven years.

Bahia Has Its Jeito: Pt. 1

November 6, 2013 Dispatches

By LUANA MONTEIRO

My family and I recently relocated to Brazil, the motherland I left over twenty years ago. Our reasons for moving were whimsical, devised in the middle of a torturous Wisconsin winter: the lure of adventure, the tropical climate and, our one practical excuse, the opportunity for my husband and daughter to master Portuguese – a language I considered my own.

Review: Lotería

November 4, 2013 Reviews

Book by MARIO ALBERTO ZAMBRANO
Reviewed by GINA LUJAN BOUBION

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Lotería is a Mexican card game that is played like bingo but with images instead of numbers. It is also the title of Mario Alberto Zambrano’s first novel about a traumatized child and her family, whose lives on this side of the border go disastrously wrong.

Zambrano uses lotería cards as a device to tell his story. Narrated by 11-year-old Luz Maria Castillo, the story is divided into 54 short vignettes, each beginning with a full-color picture of a lotería card. It is a gorgeous and expensive-looking book. (Applause for artist Jarrod Taylor here.)

A brief primer: The cards are printed with simple images: The Rose, The Drunk, The Mermaid, The Sun, etc. Each image has a corresponding dicho, or saying, but the dealer often improvises these sayings with inside jokes. Once the dealer calls out the saying or joke associated with the card, the players look for the image on their own tabla, or board. The first player to mark off a line of images wins. Lotería is good family fun. But in Zambrano’s Lotería, the Castillo family holds the worst hand ever. Poverty, border economics, and dysfunction tear them apart and rob them of hope.