All posts tagged: Flavia Martinez

Friday Reads: February 2018

Friday Reads: February 2018

February 16, 2018

Curated by SARAH WHELAN

Once again, The Common and Amherst College are honored to welcome a selection of visionary authors to our third annual LitFest–a weekend long series of events celebrating literary brilliance and nuanced expression. The talks, workshops, and panels will include, among other voices, 2017 National Book Award Finalists. This month, our staff and interns have chosen their reading in anticipation of our guests, and we present here our thoughts on just a few of these dazzling works. For more information on LitFest, please visit the Amherst College website.

Recommendations: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz.

Friday Reads: February 2018
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El Putxet

El Putxet

August 23, 2017

By FLAVIA MARTINEZ

Barcelona Montjuic

I woke up early to finish some reading, but have been in bed for hours scrolling through Facebook, with little fingers and tired eyes fixed to the screen, and now it’s 1 pm. Though the streets of Barcelona are sunny most days, only secondhand light teases in from the center courtyard of the apartment building, and sometimes in here I forget what sun is. It’s the only bedroom that faces inward, the one my host mother lived in as a girl. This was her childhood home.

El Putxet
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August 2017 Friday Reads

August 2017 Friday Reads

August 18, 2017

Curated by SARAH WHELAN 

This month, in response to a world that appears to be split across slippery fault lines, our interns are recommending books that explore cultural unity and interconnectedness. With attention to language, power, racism, and sex, these books ask the reader to reconsider her place in time as an intimate moment in a wider web of humanity.

Recommendations: Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and All the Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler.

August 2017 Friday Reads
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Friday Reads: July 2016

Friday Reads: July 2016

July 22, 2016

By SARAH WHELAN, FLAVIA MARTINEZ, JACKSON TRICE, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

 

This July, join our summer staff in going deep with your beach reading. We’re taking on ambitious projects: books that span lifetimes, begin series, and jump between planes of existence. Here are novels for your existential angst, elegies for your crises of purpose, works to help you through your election-related anxiety—what better time than summer to disappear into a world that could take over your mental world for perhaps thousands of pages, letting you take on life’s most daunting questions?

 

Recommended:

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, My Struggle: Book I by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Friday Reads: July 2016
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