By NALINI JONES
This piece is excerpted from the novel The Unbroken Coast by Nalini Jones, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.
This piece is excerpted from the novel We Were Pretending by Hannah Gersen, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.
By CLAIRE JIA
This piece is excerpted from the novel Wanting by Claire Jia, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.
This piece is excerpted from the short story collection Where to Carry the Sound by Nina Sudhakar, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.
By NEYSA KING
This piece is an excerpt from the novel How to Be Loved.
Cláudia’s eyeliner is dark as earth and heavy as her parrot-red lipstick. As she bends over to speak to me in low tones, her blouse falls open. I don’t know what it means to be attracted to her; I just want to be near her body. But she’s a college student from Rio, and I’m five years old. For the last year she’s been my nanny—dressing me, feeding me while Mom and Dad work. Every other Friday, if I’m good, she shucks me into my two-piece bathing suit with frills on the bottom and a pink butterfly on top and takes me to Singing Beach, where I can play with the skinny-legged sandpipers that the ocean is lava. Run, chase, run, chase, run, chase—my long, dark curls wet and heavy, and my suit bottom sliding down my straight hips—until the sunlight stretches as long and pale as a skeleton across the sand.
2025 was a momentous year for The Common: our fifteenth anniversary, our 30th issue, even a major motion picture based on a story in the magazine. We’re more grateful than ever for our readers, contributors, donors, and friends.
Before we close out this busy year of publishing, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the unique, resonant, and transporting pieces that made 2025 memorable. The Common published 269 contributors this year. Below, you can browse a list of the ten most-read new pieces of 2025 to get a taste of what left an impact on readers.
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Candy and Layer Cake: Zack Strait in Conversation with Richard Siken (and Five Poems)
“The whole world seemed like a five-paragraph essay but poetry rubbed against that. It was contrary and rebellious. That summer it rained a lot, and hard. We had a 100-year flood. It washed out bridges. I saw a house on the edge of a swollen wash lose its backyard and then get swept away. I didn’t want to talk about it, I wanted to make somebody feel it. I started writing every day. I was very bad at it. ”
—Richard Siken
Many fiction writers aspire to mastery of the short story form. From commercial offerings such as the “MasterClass” online series to college curricula, we are taught techniques to create a strong character and a plot leading to a resolution. The goal? “To uncover a single incidence or series of linked incidents, aiming to evoke a single effect or mood from the reader,” as phrased by Sughnen Yongo writing for Forbes. I’m convinced that this conventional attitude that expects singleness from the short story is selling it short.
In his latest collection Stories from the Edge of the Sea, Andrew Lam delivers work far beyond that narrow definition of the form. The settings are complex. Even a five-page story can encompass several decades of a character’s life. Though many pieces focus on a single protagonist, often the cast of characters is big enough for a multigenerational saga. Sometimes, the perspective shifts unexpectedly from one character to another across time and space, and in other stories a first-person narrator’s voice that begins a story disappears and the story continues in the third person, as though looking over the shoulder of the earlier first-person narrator. The emotional effects of these fourteen stories are layered; they leave us with no easy truths, but push us away from stable shores into the stormy seas of human experience.
By THEODORA BAUER
Translated by AARON CARPENTER
Piece appears below in English and the original German
Translator Note
Theodora Bauer’s novel Chikago (2017) follows two sisters from the Croatian minority in Burgenland, Austria. In this stand-alone chapter we learn that the family was ostracized from the small community in one of the poorest, but also most ethnically diverse regions in Austria. Burgenland was part of Hungary while under Hapsburg rule and is still home to Hungarian and Croatian minorities. This chapter begins with an idyllic trip that the father and his youngest daughter take to the village to do some business. When they hear a group of drunken townspeople plan on raiding the Roma camp just outside of town, where the father’s smithy is, they race back home to warn them.
Excerpted from The Conviction of Things Not Seen, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025.
The cemetery had inhabitants, and not just those whose descendants had laid them to rest. Two old men were living on the Ordoñez plot. Next to the abandoned Llora mausoleum, a family of four had pitched their makeshift tent. As more squatters crept in, to whom the administrators of the Cementerio de Manila turned a blind eye, a village of sorts arose, keeping watch over the stones of the dead, sweeping fallen leaves from their graves and removing flowers that had wilted and browned in the tropical sun. Thus they styled themselves caretakers of the graves, inspiring even greater tolerance for their presence among those in charge, such that far from brusquely restricting their movements, the guards at the gate greeted them by name and allowed them free access and egress without much resistance. The crypt of the Romulo family even hosted a sari-sari store for the cemetery’s living inhabitants, and some cunning member of the community had taken the key to the public restroom for safekeeping at the store, under the watchful eye of a gray-haired woman affectionately known as Tandang Cora—a joke entirely lost on foreign visitors who, in any case, were few.
Excerpted from The Church of Mastery, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025
Or, to use some expressions which are nearest the heart of the Masters, it is necessary for the archer to become, in spite of himself, an unmoved center. Then comes the supreme and ultimate miracle: art becoming “artless,” shooting becomes not-shooting, a shooting without bow and arrow; the teacher becomes a pupil again, the Master a beginner, the end a beginning, and the beginning perfection.
—Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
Given all their invisible stresses, all their accumulated ambitions, and the narrowness of their paths, the Freedom Riders in Pursuit of Veracity agreed they needed to relax to prepare for their journey down South; relaxation is not a luxury, it is a requirement. America has a problem with Black people relaxing. Or behaving like a boss. That’s why William would spend an entire day now and again by himself like Jesus in the wilderness. He’d meander through the weirdest stacks of a downtown bookstore just to wander. Who knows what Language was destined to change you? That’s why he took up cricket with René from Port of Spain. Why he’d take Rowena out to restaurants they could not afford to order dishes he could not pronounce—spine straight, risking glares.
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