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Grey Dumplings

January 9, 2025 Essays, Translation

By GRZEGORZ KASDEPKE
Translated from Polish by JONATHAN BAINES

Piece appears below in English and the original Polish.

Translator’s Note

The memoir-plus-bonus-recipe ‘Grey Dumplings’ by Grzegorz Kasdepke is taken from the volume Królik po islandzku (2022). When it appears in English, I hope it’ll have the title Icelandic Rabbit. It’s a collaboration with the novelist Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki. The two authors take it in turns to share a snapshot from their lives, each with a relevant recipe tacked on the end. The stories are accompanied by Aleksandra Cieślak’s striking illustrations. (Ask your search engine to show you the cover!) The short prose pieces are unfailingly comic, but there’s always something more serious going on as well. There are thirty vignettes – and thirty recipes – in total and an atmosphere of friendly competition as they stack up. Cumulatively, they paint a vivid picture of Polish life over the last several decades. ‘Grey Dumplings’ is the first of Kasdepke’s contributions. I was drawn to it by the same qualities that illuminate his writing for children: a lightly-worn irony and an exhilarating curiosity about the world.

— Jonathan Baines

Grey Dumplings

The smaller the flat, the more friction – literally and figuratively – between family members.

My parents lived in a small room in my grandparents’ flat. They were very young (as a child, of course, I didn’t appreciate that, but it’s clear to me now – and perhaps my father’s mustache did seem a little thin). It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, just until they were assigned their own three-bedroom flat on the Dziesięciny estate in Białystok. It went on for ten years. Goethe would have seen the beauty in this, at least from my childish point-of-view. One two-roomed flat and three generations: that’s the real magic of numbers, don’t you think?

Return of the Puffin

October 21, 2024 Essays, Issue 28, Issue 28 Art, Issue 28 Essays, Studio

By JAMES K. BOYCE

Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK

Memories of the Rise and Fall of VICE China, 2015-2022

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Essays

By RUONAN ZHENG

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

1. May 2021

At an assignment in Xinjiang, I am covering a rising female photographer, club-hopping with her and her boyfriend. Amidst glittering disco balls, fast drum beats, and fake US dollars tossed around by a random rapper, I am introduced to a guy who used to work for Vice China, making short documentaries. His exact greeting was: “Send my best regards to the bosses; I too graduated from there.” We exchanged our WeChats, and he pulled off some crazy dance moves on the floor afterward. I didn’t hear from him again but have enjoyed the hikes and mountain scenery posted on his WeChat Moments ever since.

“Graduated” is a word many ex-employees of Vice China use to describe their experience after leaving the company. Our time there felt as if we were a bunch of undergrads taking wacky tequila shots in the office, then still coming in hungover the next morning because there was nowhere better to go. Near the end of Vice China’s existence, Simon, one of the OGs who had worked for them since the beginning, reminisced about an end-of-the-year company cruise party, recalling those times as a dream. Back then, he did a little bit of everything—editorial, commercial, social media. There was always stuff to do, partnerships to form, and, of course, money from advertisers to spend. All the alcohol we ingested and the battles we fought with clients were preparing us for life after, in the cruel outside world.

The allure of working at Vice was very real for a twenty-something, especially for a Chinese kid. The Western influence took root and prospered at Vice China, which opposed everything a normal job in China entailed. To be recruited meant becoming part of a cool-kid club, access to a social currency, a guaranteed adventurous time.

Nadryw | Feeling Language

June 11, 2024 Essays, Translation

By JONË ZHITIA
Translated from the German by LEANNE LOCKWOOD CVETAN

Piece appears below in English and the original German.

Translator’s note:

This essay, presented here in its entirety, won the 2022 Wortmeldung prize awarded by the Crespo Foundation, and, to me, is the thousand words expressed by the picture of the immigrant soul. The submission theme was: “Ships at anchor, cars in parking lots, but I am the one who has no home. How can flight, exile, and homelessness be put into words?”

Losing the Daphne

May 21, 2024 Essays

By JESSICA E. JOHNSON

It was neither ice nor heat. That is, not one single ice storm and not one single heat wave. The relentless strangeness of weather left the Daphne this way, budded around the edge but dead in the center. She will probably not last another hot summer.

Daphne is a Daphne odora “Marginata.” The cultivar “Marginata” indicates glossy leaves that sport a pale, bright edge. It was the odora though—the sweet, pink mid-winter scent reminiscent of Fruit Loops—that made us want her in the first place, and tend to her, and carry her with us from one house to another, that made us prop her up when she grew heavy and underplant her with special varieties of bleeding heart and black mondo grass that would best show her off, that made us love and root for her, over and over.

Thirty-Seven Theses on Time and Memory

April 22, 2024 Essays, Issue 27, Issue 27 Essays, Nonfiction

By SVEN BIRKERTS

The Common Magazine · “Thirty-Seven Theses on Time and Memory” by Sven Birkerts

Drawing of author when young, by his grandfather

Grandfather’s drawing of author when young

Memory, that elusive quicksilver running through our lives. How at first, at birth, there is nothing, really, almost nothing, and how slowly it develops after that, all the years when there is no visible shadow on the ground behind us. And how it is that, for those years, we accept our lives as the steady panorama of whatever is right in front of us, moment to moment.

I’m trying to think when any memory worth remarking arrived. Did I have memories when I was ten years old? I know that in sixth grade, when we were all leaving behind Walnut Lake, our red-brick school, there was some inkling. Not a procession of memories, not yet, but rather an inchoate nostalgia, a definite sense of something being lost. There came an awareness of the past, and with it the realization that there is a kind of timeline, a sense of futurity that had not really been there before.

Summer People

March 12, 2024 Essays

By BETH BOYLE MACHLAN

Most of our old family photos are from the beach, and most of them are of my father. In them, he is always grinning, gleaming from the Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil that scented the denim shirt he wore every summer. My mother loved the beach, too, but did not like to be photographed. In all those years, Dad caught Mom on camera only once, on a boogie board riding a wave, still wearing the sunglasses that stayed on her head all summer, even after dark. She preferred to float, read, and take pictures of my brothers and me. Blindingly pale or perilously pink, like “before” ads for skin cancer, we’re inevitably chewing or punching or blinking, ruining the picture. My father, however, always looks perfect, natural, exactly where he’s supposed to be. His hands are on his hips, superhero-style, as if he’s won some high-stakes game and the beach now belongs to him.

Fatigue Can Shatter A Person

February 13, 2024 Essays

By ED YONG

This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic. Journalist Ed Yong will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2024. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.

Alexis Misko’s health has improved enough that, once a month, she can leave her house for a few hours. First, she needs to build up her energy by lying in a dark room for the better part of two days, doing little more than listening to audiobooks. Then she needs a driver, a quiet destination where she can lie down, and days of rest to recover afterward. The brief outdoor joy “never quite feels like enough,” she told me, but it’s so much more than what she managed in her first year of long COVID, when she couldn’t sit upright for more than an hour or stand for more than 10 minutes. Now, at least, she can watch TV on the same day she takes a shower.

My Grandfather’s Songs

November 16, 2023 Essays, Translation

By ALONDRA AGUILAR RANGEL
Translated by JENNIFER ACKER

Piece appears below in both English and Spanish.

There are people who express with songs what they can’t express with their own words. My grandfather is one of these people.

Papá José, as we grandchildren call him, is a reserved man, but he has a unique way of talking about his life and expressing his feelings. His hair is now covered in white and his face in lines. He usually wears a pair of gray pants, a flannel shirt, his old sandals and his light brown sombrero. He’s a working man of the countryside.

I visit him only once a year. Like many people from my country, I go to Mexico every December to spend Christmas and New Year’s with my family. It has been twelve years since I left home, the house where I grew up, the dirt streets and brick houses where I spent my childhood on the outskirts of Morelia, the capital of Michoacán. I went to elementary school there, then junior high school, until my family and I moved to the United States. So much time has passed since then. And now I have repeated the family history. Three years ago, I left my parents’ house in California to go study on the other side of the world. I can travel only once a year. The distance and time make me miss my family a lot. I question why we are constantly moving: Why do we keep looking for a better life somewhere else? This is why, for some time now, I have felt the need to talk more with Papá José, to know more about his life. I try to take advantage of every visit to talk to him and listen to his stories.

Boysenberry Girls

November 6, 2023 Essays, Farmworker, Issue 26, Issue 26 Essays

By NORA RODRIGUEZ CAMAGNA

June 1978
Central Valley, California

We demanded, we begged, we guilt-tripped our parents for money. We had reached the age where we cared about our image. We no longer accepted garage sale clothes or Kmart blue-light sale items. We wanted the hip-hugging, sailor-pant flap Chemin de Fer jeans, we wanted the upside-down-U-stitch-on-the-butt Dittos, we wanted the iconic Ralph Lauren polo, and we wanted the clunky Connie Clogs. We wanted the clothes our American middle school classmates strutted around in.