All posts tagged: Book Review

Friday Reads: August 2019

Curated by SARAH WHELAN

The Common is a proud recipient of a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, and our staff are ready to celebrate! In conjunction with the Brooklyn Book Festival, you’re invited to join Whiting Prize winners The Common, Black Warrior Review, American Short Fiction, The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), and The Offing for an evening of literary merriment at LIC Bar in Long Island City. Event details can be found here

If you’re already as excited as we are, please enjoy this month’s Friday Reads as a special treat – featuring reviews from editors at all the winning publications.

Recommendations: When You Learn The Alphabet by Kendra Allen; Two Lives: A Memoir by Vikram Seth; The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi; Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq by Jess Goodell; A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez.

Friday Reads: August 2019
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Review: Hurtling in the Same Direction – At Home in the New World

Book by MARIA TERRONE

Review by SUSAN TACENT

Cover of At Home in the New World

Maria Terrone’s grandparents were among the estimated nine million people who emigrated from Italy between 1881 and 1927. While her parents were born in the United States, her connection to Italy is deep, informing her identity and experiences as much as being a lifelong New Yorker has.

Review: Hurtling in the Same Direction – At Home in the New World
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Nina Sudhakar Begins New Role as Book Reviews Editor

The Common is excited to announce Nina Sudhakar as its new Book Reviews Editor. She has served as The Common’s Dispatches Editor since July 2018 and has been a submissions reader since September 2017. She will continue to edit dispatches as well as reviews.

Nina Sudhakar HeadshotNina Sudhakar is the author of the poetry chapbooks Matriarchetypes (winner of the 2017 Bird’s Thumb Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Embodiments (forthcoming from Sutra Press in summer 2019). Her work has appeared in, among other places, The OffingEcotone, and Midnight Breakfast, and been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry. A graduate of Amherst College (BA) and Georgetown University (JD/MSFS), she currently lives in Chicago.

On her new position, Sudhakar says, “Working for The Common over the past two years—as a prose reader and currently as Dispatches Editor—has been an absolute joy. I’m so excited to take on the role of Books Reviews Editor and continue helping our team bring exciting, thought-provoking and transporting work to our readers and the literary community.”

Browse Nina’s publications and learn more about her at www.ninasudhakar.com.

She can be reached at bookreviews@thecommononline.org.

Nina Sudhakar Begins New Role as Book Reviews Editor
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Friday Reads: March 2019

Curated by: SARAH WHELAN

Issue 17 is almost here! Subscribe by March 31st to get your copy, then kick off the weekend with a book recommendation from one of our Issue 17 contributors. This month, our contributors are taking us on inventive narrative journeys across all seven continents and through all four corners of consciousness.

Recommendations: I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine, Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin, Naming the No-Name Woman by Jasmine An, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Friday Reads: March 2019
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Review: The Distance Home

Book by PAULA SAUNDERS

Reviewed by TESS CALLAHANthe distance home cover

Willa Cather once said, “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” I thought of those words while reading Paula Saunders’s cinematic debut novel, The Distance Home, which she has said is based on her fractured 1960s South Dakota childhood. Saunders draws from a deep well. 

The Distance Home joins such recent novels as Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Book of American Martyrs, Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth and Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton that explore family dysfunction. Saunders asks us to consider the violent underside of American drivenness and its impact on a family’s most vulnerable members.  

Review: The Distance Home
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Review: Alpha: Abidjan to Paris

Graphic novel written by BESSORA and illustrated by BARROUX. Translated from the French by SARAH ARDIZZONE.

Reviewed by JULIA LICHTBLAU

Abidjan to Paris
In 1994, the last year my husband and I lived in Paris, a Senegalese woman named Delphine cleaned our apartment, often bringing her baby girl. At some point, she asked us to help her resolve her immigration problems. The baby was a French citizen; Delphine had come to France to work for French expats returning from Dakar and been let go some years ago.

Review: Alpha: Abidjan to Paris
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Review: Nerve Chorus

Book by WILLA CARROLL
Reviewed by ANDREA JURJEVIĆ

Cover of Nerve Chorus by Willa Carroll

Willa Carroll was an experimental dancer and actor before turning to poetry, and many of the poems of her remarkable debut collection, Nerve Chorus, revolve around performance and the body. Her work reminds us that much of our experience transcends our verbal abilities. With personal subject matter and elegant, yet accessible, philosophical explorations, Carroll succeeds in maintaining a strong tonal unity and distinct lyricism. Like experimental dance, these poems invite a visceral experience. Meanwhile, they should be admired for their lyrical flexibility, the exactness of their imagery, their life-affirming quality, as well as their intellectual engagement. Though this is her first collection, Carroll’s poems have garnered attention for some time. She won Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Prize for her poem “Chorus of Omissions,” and her piece “No Final Curtain” won First Place in Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest.

Review: Nerve Chorus
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Review: Wonder Valley

Book by IVY POCHODA

Reviewed by LISA ALEXANDER and JULIA LICHTBLAU

In Ivy Pochoda’s latest novel, Wonder Valley, we find ourselves amidst a scruffy, largely invisible subset of Los Angelenos: drifters, con artists, criminals, quack healers, the homeless. The few in their orbit who have money or a measure of success are in danger of losing their souls. Everyone is close to the edge, all the time. Yearning. Longing. Trying to get someplace. Anywhere but here.

Review: Wonder Valley
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Review: Empire of Glass

Book by KAITLIN SOLIMINE

Reviewed by JENNIFER CODY EPSTEIN

 

Empire of Glass

 

Early on in Empire of Glass, the novel’s American narrator offers fair warning that what follows will not be straightforward: “So much of what I’m telling you is already reimagined, reconfigured so convex angles are made concave, mirrors reflecting other mirrors reflecting an uncertain, setting sun.” That includes her name, Lao K (or “Familiar K”), a nickname her Chinese homestay family gave to replace “a long, complicated name we could never pronounce.”

Review: Empire of Glass
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