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LitFest Friday Reads: February 2019

February 15, 2019 Reviews

It’s that time again—The Common and Amherst College will be hosting the fourth annual LitFest at the end of the month. For three days, February 28^th to March 2^nd, award-winning authors, poets, and critics will descend on Amherst to read, discuss, teach, and celebrate great writing. This year the lineup includes two National Book Award finalists, two Pulitzer Prize winners, and a New York Times bestseller. View the full list of participating writers and a calendar of events here.

What We Were Like Then

September 1, 2017 Essays, In House

By EMILY EVERETT

We agonize over breakfast choices in the towering Ferry Building food market, then walk the piers eating flaky empanadas. But it’s cold and too windy, February, so we turn inland toward North Beach. Our cousin, a local, will meet us there for lunch. He’s suggested a tour of the neighborhood’s old Beat Generation haunts.

My twin sister and I are visiting San Francisco, ostensibly to see a concert but also just to see each other, since a year ago she moved away to the suburbs of Philadelphia. For the few short days we’re here, the West Coast experiences torrential rain. LA is flooding and the Bay Area is even drizzlier than usual. Becky and I are strategic—Saturday is going to be the driest day, and we want to see everything.

Friday Reads: July 2017

July 21, 2017 Reviews

Ah, July Friday Reads, where the temperatures are high and the stakes are even higher. This month, read alongside Issue 13 contributors and our managing editor as we face devastating epidemics, maternal death, and the eternal angst of feminine adolescence. Though each book finds a uniqueness in its approach to calamity, each work uses the minute details to capture the universal perils of love, loss, and loneliness.

Recommendations: Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, The Girls by Emma Cline, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, recommended by Megan Fernandes (poetry contributor)

Friday Reads: March 2017

March 24, 2017 Reviews

Outsiders looking in can make for a compelling read, and that’s exactly what we’ve been reading this month. March’s recommendations examine characters isolated on the outskirts; a man estranged from his Tennessee community, a mother kept in solitude, and a whistleblower ostracized by his former colleagues. It’s not all happy ending, but it’s all worth a read.

Recommended:

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy, August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones, and The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín.

Friday Reads: February 2017

February 17, 2017 Reviews

This February, we’re busily reading new novels by three award-winning authors who will be visiting us next month for LitFest at Amherst College. If there’s a common thread for this month’s Friday Reads, it’s memory: commemorating events, friendships, departures, and failures. But it could just as easily be their outstanding quality, as we contribute to the already effusive praise these books have earned. Get reading, and then join us March 2-4 for LitFest!

Recommended:

Swing Time by Zadie Smith, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder, and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson.

Off Edgware Road

December 19, 2016 Essays, In House

By EMILY EVERETT

london snow

I first went to London as an undergrad, on a yearlong study abroad program in University College London’s intimidating English department. When I returned very reluctantly to the US, I often dreamed about London, but in those dreams I would find familiar places moved, distorted, and the people I missed not where I looked for them. After graduation, I moved again to the UK for a master’s program, but mainly to get back to London. I had discovered, after a few panicky weeks of foreign disorientation, that the city suited me—and also that my quiet home in Massachusetts no longer did. At 22, one seemed to preclude the other; London felt strange and exotic in a way that had become a daily necessity.

Friday Reads: December 2016

December 16, 2016 Reviews

By EMILY EVERETT, ALICIA LOPEZ, MEGAN TUCKER ORRINGER and SARAH WHELAN

To round out 2016, we’re reading novels new and old for December’s Friday Reads. Explore the social dynamics of male friendships, the black experience through generations and continents, the loneliness of a haunted orphan, and the self-consciousness (or self-destructiveness?) of the writer. After all, the dark days of winter are perfect for tackling big questions, and these towering works of fiction are perfect for raising them.

Recommended:

Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder, and Despair by Vladimir Nabokov.

Friday Reads: August 2016

August 19, 2016 Reviews

By ELIZABETH WITTE, EMILY EVERETT, ALI ROHDE, LISA ALEXANDER

Our recommended books this month explore unfamiliar territory, in both form and subject. We’re reading formats that do something different with time, place, and space on the page, through writing that is fiercely modern and refreshingly curious.

Recommended:

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Lui, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, That That by Ken Mikolowski, and Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi

All posts tagged: Emily Everett

LitFest Friday Reads: February 2019

What We Were Like Then

Friday Reads: July 2017

Friday Reads: March 2017

Friday Reads: February 2017

Off Edgware Road

Friday Reads: December 2016

Friday Reads: August 2016

Discover the extraordinary in The Common.

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