2016 | Page 15 | The Common

Friday Reads: February 2016

February 5, 2016 Reviews

By MARIAN CROTTY, NICK FULLER GOOGINS, GRANT KITTRELL, SARAH SMARSH

How much more palatable is any dish when “imbued with the stories of home”? We’re exploring that this month in our recommendations, which variously braid entertainment and education in their reading experiences. Grow as a writer, a poet, a consumer, a human being—and do it while laughing, remembering home, or teetering on the edge of your seat.

Recommended:

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury, The Door by Magda Szabó,Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi

Horizontal Feminists: An Interview with Alexander Chee

February 2, 2016 Interviews

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Alexander Chee’s new novel The Queen of the Night, set almost entirely in France under the Second Empire (1866–1872), is the first-person narrative of a silver-voiced American orphan who maneuvers her way to acclaim as an opera singer, via the circus, can-can dancing, prostitution, and service as the Empress’s maid. Three desires drive Lilliet: to free herself from the tenor who literally owns her (having bought her from a whore house), to become a singer, and to reunite with the man she loves. Chee’s novel sumptuously recreates the intertwined worlds of les grandes horizontales or courtesans, the opera, and the court of Emperor Louis-Napoléon and Empress Eugénie with its spies and secret police.

This winter in Manhattan, New York, The Common’s Book Reviews Editor Julia Lichtblau talked at length with Alexander Chee about his forthcoming novel.

Review: The Queen of the Night

February 2, 2016 Reviews

Book by ALEXANDER CHEE
Reviewed by JULIA LICHTBLAU

The Queen of the Night

Every so often a contemporary novel makes me want to go back to college—not because I don’t get it, but because the book induces a craving to know everything about its world. Reading The Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee’s hefty second novel, ten years in the making, I was ready to fill out the applications for a Master’s in 19th century French history and literature (with a minor in opera).

Set mostly in France under the Second Empire, (1866–1872), it’s the first-person narrative of a silver-voiced American orphan and master of self-reinvention, who becomes a European opera star and brushes the pinnacles of European power before crashing back to earth in the New World. Her rebirth wouldn’t be out of place on reality TV.

January 2016 Poetry Feature

January 29, 2016 Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

New Work for the New Year

This month we welcome Cassandra Cleghorn to our pages, presenting poems included in her first book, Four Weathercocks, which will be published by Marick Press in March. We’re also happy to be welcoming back TC contributors David Lehman, Jonathan Moody, and Sylvie Durbec. Lehman’s new book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Jonathan Moody won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize for his collection Olympic Butter Gold, published in November 2015. The book includes five poems first published in The Common. Jean Follain Prize-winner Sylvie Durbec’s poem “Shining Red in the Torrent” is offered here in its entirety, translated by Denis Hirson. An excerpt from the poem was published in The Common Issue 10.

Review: The Small Backs of Children

January 23, 2016 Reviews

BY LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
Reviewed by ANDREW WILLIS

The Small Backs of Children

In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart defended the First Amendment right of movie theaters to show a French art film called The Lovers. With characteristic candor, Stewart wrote that he knew the film was not pornographic because even though he couldn’t strictly define such material, he could say, rather famously now, “I know it when I see it.” When he saw The Lovers, he didn’t see “it,” that “hard-core” obscenity; he saw art. I envy Stewart’s certainty, his uncannily astute powers of perception. I can’t always claim that I see the clear line between art and obscenity, or the times in which art, for art’s sake, justifies the dubious means of its creation. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is merely the latest to leave me wondering about art and the blurred lines it creates.

Ask a Local: V. Penelope Pelizzon, Willimantic, CT

January 21, 2016 Interviews

With V. PENELOPE PELIZZON

Your name: V. Penelope Pelizzon

Current city or town: Willimantic, Connecticut

How long have you lived here: 13 years.

Review: A General Theory of Oblivion

January 20, 2016 Reviews

Book by JOSÉ EDUARDO AGUALUSA
Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

A General Theory of Oblivion

War. Diamonds and oil and war. If in the United States we’ve heard anything about Angola, it’s likely related to the protracted bloodshed or to the trade in oil and diamonds. The seventh largest country in Africa, situated on the Atlantic coast just north of Namibia, Angola became a Portuguese colony in the 16th century. Fighting for self-government began in 1961 and went on until the 1974 Carnation Revolution and the end of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal led to the country’s withdrawal and, in 1975, Angolan independence. This did not end war in Angola, however.

Fueled by the oil and diamond trades and Cold War politics, groups of former resistance fighters consolidated their positions and went on fighting each other. Supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba on one side and the United States and (white) South Africa on the other, the fighting in Angola went on until a key leader was killed in action in 2002, ending 41 years of nearly uninterrupted fighting.

Up North

January 20, 2016 Dispatches

By CHRIS KELSEY

We booked three nights but stayed four. We traveled in-state to save money but spent just as much as we might have on flights to the West Coast. It was November. Going against all reason at our latitude, we headed north.

Linefork: In Proximity to a Movie in the Making

January 16, 2016 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

storyboard

A familiar sound comes from the other room. A voice—from Kentucky; from a monitor speaker, ten feet away in Massachusetts. I hear it in the kitchen. A clip of speech, a cadence heard again and for not the last time. Open floor plan living: all sounds permeate. Racket of chickens, dogs, lilting voice, banjo.

A film, incomplete—still very much its audio-visual pieces. We cohabitate, this thing and I. I am not the maker, though he lives here too. I am adjacent to the making.

I was there when it happened. The beginnings of this thing that has now sprawled through our lives. That was three years ago, on a summer road trip from Boston to points south, stopping to see friends in Charlottesville, Nashville, Memphis, before making our way back north.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ Poem Reprinted in Best American Poetry 2016

January 16, 2016 News and Events

The Best American Poetry 2016, ed. Edward Hirsch, included Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ “The First Last Light in the Sky,” from The Common Issue 09.

All posts tagged: 2016

Friday Reads: February 2016

Horizontal Feminists: An Interview with Alexander Chee

Review: The Queen of the Night

January 2016 Poetry Feature

Review: The Small Backs of Children

Ask a Local: V. Penelope Pelizzon, Willimantic, CT

Review: A General Theory of Oblivion

Up North

Linefork: In Proximity to a Movie in the Making

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ Poem Reprinted in Best American Poetry 2016

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