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All posts tagged: 2024

My Five-Thousand-Meter Years

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Fiction

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

The rumor was there was a backdoor into the best running camp in the capital. To get your kid in, there’d better be something wrong with their mind.

Mother drove me to the facility with a note from Dr. Chen in her purse. For four hours, roads splintered and strayed under our wheels. Eventually we arrived at the far Northeast corner: cornfields and silent cranes, tired grey apartments, willow trees bowing their listless branches.

The American Scholar

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Fiction

By JIANAN QIAN

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.

Alex dislikes the security check in Shanghai’s subway stations, from both an ideological and personal perspective. Being American, he hates any intrusion on privacy. And today he’s carrying a black dildo in his backpack, wrapped in a wine tote bag with a Spanish brand name on the outside. Still, he worries the X-ray man might stop him for inspection.

He touches the student ID in his jeans pocket. Back in college, George—his Chinese teacher whose toupee once came loose—had told him that the Chinese respect Ph.D. students.

The man lets him pass.

“Xie xie,” Alex thanks him.

It’s not rush hour. He finds a seat and places his backpack on his lap. With his uncombable hair sprawling out in all directions, he looks like the photo of Einstein that appears in Chinese high school textbooks. Not that Alex would know about that. His destination is the west side of the city, a five-star hotel. A sex class will take place in one of the suites and he’ll be one of the models. It’s his first time participating in the sex industry, and the thought brings a smile to his face. However, the young woman sitting beside him seems uncomfortable or offended by his presence, and moves to another seat.

Memories of the Rise and Fall of VICE China, 2015-2022

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Essays

By RUONAN ZHENG

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

1. May 2021

At an assignment in Xinjiang, I am covering a rising female photographer, club-hopping with her and her boyfriend. Amidst glittering disco balls, fast drum beats, and fake US dollars tossed around by a random rapper, I am introduced to a guy who used to work for Vice China, making short documentaries. His exact greeting was: “Send my best regards to the bosses; I too graduated from there.” We exchanged our WeChats, and he pulled off some crazy dance moves on the floor afterward. I didn’t hear from him again but have enjoyed the hikes and mountain scenery posted on his WeChat Moments ever since.

“Graduated” is a word many ex-employees of Vice China use to describe their experience after leaving the company. Our time there felt as if we were a bunch of undergrads taking wacky tequila shots in the office, then still coming in hungover the next morning because there was nowhere better to go. Near the end of Vice China’s existence, Simon, one of the OGs who had worked for them since the beginning, reminisced about an end-of-the-year company cruise party, recalling those times as a dream. Back then, he did a little bit of everything—editorial, commercial, social media. There was always stuff to do, partnerships to form, and, of course, money from advertisers to spend. All the alcohol we ingested and the battles we fought with clients were preparing us for life after, in the cruel outside world.

The allure of working at Vice was very real for a twenty-something, especially for a Chinese kid. The Western influence took root and prospered at Vice China, which opposed everything a normal job in China entailed. To be recruited meant becoming part of a cool-kid club, access to a social currency, a guaranteed adventurous time.

Against This Earth, We Knock

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Poetry, Studio

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By JINJIN XU

I try to feel this is home ¹

I don’t think

I am a foreigner ²
I was not supposed to be living ³

Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature II

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Poetry

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE.

Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.

Table of Contents:

Wu Wenying, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Departure” & “Visiting Lingyan Mountain”
Su Shi, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Return to Lin Gao at Night”
Yun Qin Wang, “The First Rain”
CAO Collective, “qiào bā”

Podcast: Kevin Dean on “Patron Saints”

September 27, 2024 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Kevin Dean

Kevin Dean speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Patron Saints,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Kevin talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which follows a young American trying to find his place in Cairo, while the city roils with political uncertainty after the Arab Spring uprising. Kevin also discusses how it feels to write from memory, what he tries to capture when writing about place, and what projects he’s working on now.

September 2024 Poetry Feature

September 26, 2024 Poetry

New Poems by Our Contributors MORRI CREECH, ELISA GABBERT, ANNA GIRGENTI, and GRANT KITTRELL.

Table of Contents:

Morri Creech, “The Others”
Elisa Gabbert, “A Hermitage”
Anna Girgenti, “The Goldfinch”
Grant Kittrell, “Losing It”

The Others
By Morri Creech

The children that I have never had follow me, late, through the vacant corridors.
They whisper there is still time, time for the quarter moon to nock its black arrow

The Common’s Issue 28 Launch Party

September 24, 2024 News, News and Events

The Common Fall Launch Party—Locals Night!
Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 7pm
Friendly Reading Room, Frost Library
Amherst College, Amherst, MA

Free and open to the public, wine and snacks will be provided.

Join The Common for the launch of Issue 28! We welcome four esteemed contributors who happen to be local: Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol. Issues will be available for purchase. We’ll have brief readings, a short Q&A, and lots of time to mingle!

Left to Right: Iqra Khan, James K. Boyce, Douglas Koziol, Brad Leithauser

Iqra Khan is a Pushcart-nominated poet, activist, and lawyer. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at UW Madison. She is also a winner of the 2024 Disquiet Prize in poetry and the Frontier Global Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Southeast Review, Adroit Journal, Swamp Pink, The Rumpus, among others. Her work is centered around collective nostalgia, Muslim credibility, and the Muslim burden of becoming.

Poet, novelist, essayist, Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books, the most recent of which is Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poems, will be published by Knopf next spring. He is a former theater critic for Time, and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland. A former professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

James K. Boyce is an author, naturalist, and environmental economist. He is the recipient of the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award. “Return of the Puffin” is adapted from his book-in-progress, Our Better Nature. Website: www.jameskboyce.com.

Douglas Koziol is a writer living in Western Massachusetts. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Quarterly West, The Millions, and Lunch Ticket, among other places. He received his MFA from Emerson College.

What We’re Reading: September 2024

September 20, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

To kick off the autumn column, our contributors bring you three novels that invite unexpected encounters with time. A recommendation from former TC submissions reader SAMUEL JENSEN trains our sights on the future of the American dream; with LILY LUCAS HODGES, we unearth an artifact of historical erasure; and with HILDEGARD HANSEN, we finally transcend history through prose that gropes at the primordial core of life.

Alexander Sammartino’s Last Acts; recommended by Reader-Emeritus Samuel Jensen.

I picked up Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, because of the cover. Seeing it at the book store, it was as if someone had walked up the road from my childhood home, aimed their camera across the arroyo, and snapped a picture. I’m from El Paso, Texas and Sammartino’s novel is set in Phoenix, Arizona—two very different places—but still: a sunbleached strip mall with a gun shop in it, burning under a merciless blue sky? It was like running into someone you’re not sure you wanted to see again.

Am I a Fraud? Are We All? An Interview with Aparna Nancherla

September 19, 2024 Interviews

Jennifer Acker and Aparna Nancherla talking at Amherst College's LitFest.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Gwilliam | Amherst College

APARNA NANCHERLA is in a class of her own. A writer, comedian, actor, and podcast host, Nancherla returned to her alma mater, Amherst College, for a conversation with The Common’s editor-in-chief, JENNIFER ACKER, during LitFest 2024. The two discussed her diverse creative portfolio, standup as a mode of self-expression, and her newest memoir-in-essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For a recording of their full conversation and more about LitFest, visit the Amherst College website.

The Common Fall Launch Party—Locals Night! Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 7pm Friendly Reading Room, Frost Library Amherst College, Amherst, MA

Free and open to the public, wine and snacks will be provided.

The Common Fall Launch Party—Locals Night!
Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 7pm
Friendly Reading Room, Frost Library
Amherst College, Amherst, MA