All posts tagged: 2025

Faction of None

Faction of None

October 27, 2025 , ,

By TAMAS DOBOZY

The videos of Christmas dinner were for Mom, or so Pete said. His gift, honoring the hours she’d spent preparing the meals. But he couldn’t fool me—or her. He filmed the dinners because it got him out of eating what she cooked: the tofurkey he hated, the beet salad that made him gag, the quinoa that sparkled like a plateful of sand. Pete would rather have starved than eaten food he didn’t like, which was most food, staying skinny as a nail with the hunger he preferred, as if craving was better than sustenance, desire superior to satisfaction, and want itself his personal god.

Faction of None
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The Melnikov House

The Melnikov House

October 27, 2025 , ,

By MARTHA COOLEY

In 1927, a Russian architect named Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov built an astonishing home in Moscow for himself and his wife, son, and daughter. Using affordable materials (building supplies were scarce), Melnikov and his son pitched in alongside several hired laborers to frame and erect the house. A photo taken at completion shows the owner—a slender man dressed in a suit, spats, and top hat—standing proudly in front of his home, with his wife (sporting a plaid coat and matching hat) at his side.

The Melnikov House
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Podcast: Sarah Smarsh on “Bone of the Bone”

Podcast: Sarah Smarsh on “Bone of the Bone”

October 24, 2025 , ,

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Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Sarah Smarsh

National Book Award finalist SARAH SMARSH speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common’s fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama’s best books of the year list.

Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class, out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she’s working on next.
 

Sarah Smarsh headshot and photo of her book "bone of the bone" 

Podcast: Sarah Smarsh on “Bone of the Bone”
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October 2025 Poetry Feature: From DEAR DIANE: LETTERS FOR A REVOLUTIONARY

October 2025 Poetry Feature: From DEAR DIANE: LETTERS FOR A REVOLUTIONARY

October 23, 2025

By TINA CANE

headshot of the author black and white

Photo of Tina Cane by Cormac Crump

On DEAR DIANE: LETTERS FOR A REVOLUTIONARY
Between May 1968 and December 1971, poet Diane Di Prima wrote a poetry collection comprised of sixty-three “Revolutionary Letters.” Several years ago, I purchased a rare set of the first thirty-four of Di Prima’s letter poems—typed on long sheets of construction paper, stapled, and hand-corrected in ballpoint pen. Bought as a celebratory gift for myself, after having been awarded a fellowship, it’s a humble yet fierce extravagance. While the booklet appears sturdy, its yellowed pages are somewhat delicate. I rarely handle it—too worried about spilling coffee, or having someone in my house mistake the unassuming bundle for recycling. Most of the time, my sheath of Di Prima poems sits in my bookcase, atop a row of books by Marguerite Duras.

October 2025 Poetry Feature: From DEAR DIANE: LETTERS FOR A REVOLUTIONARY
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Some Kind of Corporate Retreat

Some Kind of Corporate Retreat

October 14, 2025 ,

By TERAO TETSUYA
Translated by KEVIN WANG

The piece appears below in both English and the original Chinese.

 

Translator’s Note

“Some Kind of Corporate Retreat” is collected in Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets (HarperVia, 2025), a book of nine linked short stories about Taiwanese prodigies turned disillusioned Big Tech engineers. In official American narratives, immigrant experiences often become flattened into palatable arcs of resilience. But this story insists on being wounded, unresolved, and playfully deviant in its exploration of hollow relationships and a simmering desire for destruction.

Some Kind of Corporate Retreat
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Stop Being Precious About Process: Julian Zabalbeascoa interviews Michael James Plunkett

Stop Being Precious About Process: Julian Zabalbeascoa interviews Michael James Plunkett

October 13, 2025

In this interview, JULIAN ZABALBAEASCOA and MICHAEL JAMES PLUNKETT explore how a chance visit to the World War I battle site of Verdun sparked a decades-long journey that led to Plunkett writing Zone Rouge. Their conversation took place across time zones as Zalbalbeascoa was in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, and Plunkett was home in Columbus, Ohio, having just welcomed his second child. In their correspondence, they cover makeshift writing rituals from Morgan Stanley’s cafeteria to subway rides, the joys of publishing with independent presses, the art of dodging probable plot twists, resilience in the face of climate change, and “fiction’s ability to explore the human condition in ways data can’t.”

Left: Julian Zabalbeascoa's headshot. A bald man with facial hair poses in front of a body of water, looking into the distance. Right: Michael Jerome Plunkett's headshot. A man with a grey beanie and facial hair smiles. He's wearing a black Carhartt jacket.

Julian Zabalbeascoa (Left) and Michael Jerome Plunkett (Right)

Julian Zalbalbeascoa (JZ): Since The Common is a journal that celebrates how place functions in our lives, I thought we’d begin with the setting of your novel: Verdun, site of the decisive battle in World War I, which resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 French and German soldiers. When did your interest in Verdun (the place and the battle) begin? And when did you think to yourself, There may be a novel here.

Stop Being Precious About Process: Julian Zabalbeascoa interviews Michael James Plunkett
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The Reading Life: There is No “Purpose” (and Perhaps No “Progress”) in Nature: On Reading Oliver Sacks’ Letters

The Reading Life: There is No “Purpose” (and Perhaps No “Progress”) in Nature: On Reading Oliver Sacks’ Letters

October 9, 2025
 

 

The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.

 

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
―Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a letter of February 20, 1997, to a humorist, Oliver Sacks says that one of his favorite words is APOCOPE. “I love its sound, its explosiveness (as do some of my Tourettic friends—for whom it becomes a 4-syllable verbal tic which can be impacted or imploded into a tenth of a second) and the fact that it compresses 4 vowels and 4 syllables into a mere seven letters.” This is the type of response I adore: succinct, passionate, informed, all around a single, transient word. The quote appears in Dr. Sacks’ Letters (Knopf, 2024, 726 pages), edited by his long-time assistant and researcher Kate Edgar. Notice the length of the volume: it is massive, even though, as Edgar mentions, it only comprises about a tenth of all of the letters Dr. Sacks wrote; he was an inveterate, compulsive logophile who wrote nonstop on napkins, pads, notebooks, and anything else within reach. (W. H. Auden, an early champion and long-time friend of Sacks, addressed him in print with the honorific “Dr.”; I gladly follow it here.)

The Reading Life: There is No “Purpose” (and Perhaps No “Progress”) in Nature: On Reading Oliver Sacks’ Letters
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