Sam Spratford | The Common

All posts tagged: Sam Spratford

What We’re Reading: April 2025

April 18, 2025 Reviews

The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring.

Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman

I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.

What We’re Reading: February 2025

February 21, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

This month, contributors KATHARINE HALLS, THEA MATTHEWS, and OLGA ZILBERBOURG take your reading lists to Prague, Damascus, and New York City with four poetry and fiction recommendations that are wholly absorbing, in their stories and settings alike.

Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, trans. Paul Wilson; recommended by TC Online Contributor Olga Zilberbourg

A Tyranny of Dreams: Review of Proper Imposters

January 28, 2025 Reviews

Reviewed by SAM SPRATFORD

In Proper Imposters, Panhandler Books compiles four novellas from authors who are attuned to the mystical nature of doubles, a timeless form, and who hold them up to the contradictions of our moment, the paradoxes and counterparts on which our societies rest. MAURICIO MONTIEL FIGUEIRAS, JEFF PARKER, CHAYA BHUVANESWAR, AND JASON OCKERT each spin gripping tales of doppelgangers, pairs whose likeness in body or spirit fades in and out of focus. These are stories of concealment, intentional or not, and revelations of often melodramatic proportions. When the authors align these pieces just right, it resembles the dazzling effect of a hall of mirrors. Each author manages, at various times, to pierce through narrative’s typical strictures into the world of dreams, where fantastical images diagnose with overwhelming clarity the ills of our time.

What We’re Reading: January 2025

January 24, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

As we’re finding our footing in 2025 and, in the U.S., shoring up against new political realities, January has been pervaded by a sense of uncertainty. The books our community is reading right now seem to respond to this feeling, in areas of life spanning from assimilation to cooking anxiety. Read on for recommendations from our contributors AFTON MONTGOMERY, HEMA PADHU, and ADRIENNE SU that just might help to stabilize your spirits—or, at the very least, provide some quality distraction.

Miriam Ungerer’s Good Cheap Food and Margaret Eby’s You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible; recommended by Issue 28 Poet Adrienne Su

When working on my last book of poems, Peach State (2021), I often wrote my way to the kitchen: writing about a dish made me want to cook it. These days, I’m cooking my way to the proverbial typewriter. I read about food. Then I cook something I’ve read about, and the process nudges me to fill a page.

Holiday Reads 2024

December 17, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

Exploring migration from the perspective of plants; mystical historical fiction that will transport you from New England to Haiti; and one woman’s chance to do life over again.

We revisited our community’s favorite reads from throughout the year and compiled a list of memoirs, essay collections, novels, and creative nonfiction works to inspire a diverse holiday reading list, or kick off your reading plans for the new year. All of these titles were originally highlighted in our “What We’re Reading” and Book Reviews columns, and we think they deserve a second spotlight. Read on for recommendations from the Phoenix desert, the Indian subcontinent, the seaside, and more.

Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For

A poetic memoir-in-essays about Parker’s struggle to live freely amid the omnipresent legacy of enslavement in America. Beginning with her childhood as the only Black girl in a conservative, religious town, Parker moves between wide-ranging topics—including everything from cop killings, to plantation tours, to therapy and Jay-Z—but frames it all with the motif of the slave ship.

What We’re Reading: December 2024

December 13, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

If you’re in need of a deep breath amid the holiday frenzy, look no further. This month, Issue 28 poets and longtime TC contributors OLENA JENNINGS and ELIZABETH HAZEN bring you three recommendations that force you to slow down and observe. Hazen’s picks provide an intimate window into the paradoxical, tragic, and sometimes ridiculous characters that inhabit our world, while Jennings’ holds up a mirror to readers, asking them to meditate on the act of viewing itself.

Chantal V. Johnson’s Post-Traumatic and Kate Greathead’s The Book of George; recommended by Issue 28 Contributor Elizabeth Hazen

Typically, I have a few books going at once, and I am almost always at the very least reading one physical book and listening to another. Often, the pairings reveal interesting connections, and my most recent reads—Kate Greathead’s latest, The Book of George, and Chantal V. Johnson’s debut, Post-Traumatic—did not disappoint.

Both books are contemporary, the former out just this October, the latter in 2022, and feature protagonists who are deeply flawed but trying to figure out who they are. They hail from starkly different backgrounds, though, and this determines the starkly different difficulties they encounter as they navigate adulthood.

What We’re Reading: November 2024

November 22, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

With the holidays coming up, many of us turn to books for company on cold nights, or a respite from the stress of the season. If you’re craving an escape into the world of ideas, look no further! This month, our contributors DOUGLAS KOZIOL, CARSON WOLFE, and ANGIE MACRI deliver an eclectic mix of nonfiction and poetry recommendations sure to satisfy and inspire the curious reader.

Nick Pinkerton’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn; recommended by Issue 28 contributor Douglas Koziol

Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn is, in one sense, an elegy to a type of moviegoing no longer possible. Set in a single-screen Taipei theater on its final night, as it plays the 1967 wuxia (a Chinese martial arts subgenre) classic, Dragon Inn, to a handful of people, it would be easy to read the film as overly sentimental or nostalgic. But Nick Pinkerton resists this temptation in his book on the film, which treats the concerns of Goodbye, Dragon Inn with a wonderfully discursive and prismatic critical eye.

What We’re Reading: October 2024

October 18, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

This month, our online contributors CHRIS JOHN POOLE, JULES FITZ GERALD, and LAURA NAGLE recommend three inventive, deeply human books with stories that traverse two oceans—from Japan, to Mexico, to Norway.

Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami (trans. Sophie Hughes); recommended by TC Online Contributor Chris John Poole

In her author’s note to This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor writes that “to live in a city is to live among stories.” The city in question is Veracruz, Melchor’s birthplace, a city of cartel violence and political corruption; ritual magic and cold, hard truth. Veracruz’s stories, meanwhile, are those which are gleaned from—and imposed onto—its grim realities.

The stories in This Is Not Miami are crónicas, a genre with no direct equivalent in the Anglophone canon. Crónicas mix reportage and fiction, in a manner akin to gonzo journalism. They favour subjective accounts and firsthand experience over hard data and rigid chronology. Melchor’s crónicas collate rumours, folk myths, and personal narratives, injecting reportage where necessary.

What We’re Reading: August 2024

August 23, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The summer is waning, and here at The Common, we’re soaking in the quiet moments before the final stretch of production for our fall issue. Read on for recommendations from JAY BOSS RUBIN, EMILY EVERETT, and myself, for three pithy books that can help stretch out the season’s end.

Announcing The Common’s Fifth Literary Editorial Fellow

August 19, 2024 News and Events

(Amherst, Mass. August 19, 2024)— The Common has announced Sam Spratford ’24 as the 2024-25 Literary Editorial Fellow, marking the fifth year of the fellowship at Amherst College’s award-winning, open-access literary journal.

Launched in 2020 with the generous support of the Whiting Foundation and sustained by Amherst College alumni donors, the Literary Editorial Fellowship (LEF) was introduced with three goals in mind: to strengthen the bridge between The Common’s existing Literary Publishing Internship (LPI) for undergraduates and the professional publishing world; to provide real-world literary experience for an Amherst graduate, transferable to a wide range of fields; and to increase the capacity of The Common’s publishing and programming operations.