Photo courtesy of author
Red Lake, Croatia
“Why are they so persistent in trying to explore the unknowable?”
~Comment from a villager, following the latest Red Lake expedition
By TERAO TETSUYA
Translated by KEVIN WANG
The piece appears below in both English and the original Chinese.
Translator’s Note
“Some Kind of Corporate Retreat” is collected in Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets (HarperVia, 2025), a book of nine linked short stories about Taiwanese prodigies turned disillusioned Big Tech engineers. In official American narratives, immigrant experiences often become flattened into palatable arcs of resilience. But this story insists on being wounded, unresolved, and playfully deviant in its exploration of hollow relationships and a simmering desire for destruction.
In this interview, JULIAN ZABALBAEASCOA and MICHAEL JAMES PLUNKETT explore how a chance visit to the World War I battle site of Verdun sparked a decades-long journey that led to Plunkett writing Zone Rouge. Their conversation took place across time zones as Zalbalbeascoa was in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, and Plunkett was home in Columbus, Ohio, having just welcomed his second child. In their correspondence, they cover makeshift writing rituals from Morgan Stanley’s cafeteria to subway rides, the joys of publishing with independent presses, the art of dodging probable plot twists, resilience in the face of climate change, and “fiction’s ability to explore the human condition in ways data can’t.”
Julian Zabalbeascoa (Left) and Michael Jerome Plunkett (Right)
Julian Zalbalbeascoa (JZ): Since The Common is a journal that celebrates how place functions in our lives, I thought we’d begin with the setting of your novel: Verdun, site of the decisive battle in World War I, which resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 French and German soldiers. When did your interest in Verdun (the place and the battle) begin? And when did you think to yourself, There may be a novel here.
The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
―Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a letter of February 20, 1997, to a humorist, Oliver Sacks says that one of his favorite words is APOCOPE. “I love its sound, its explosiveness (as do some of my Tourettic friends—for whom it becomes a 4-syllable verbal tic which can be impacted or imploded into a tenth of a second) and the fact that it compresses 4 vowels and 4 syllables into a mere seven letters.” This is the type of response I adore: succinct, passionate, informed, all around a single, transient word. The quote appears in Dr. Sacks’ Letters (Knopf, 2024, 726 pages), edited by his long-time assistant and researcher Kate Edgar. Notice the length of the volume: it is massive, even though, as Edgar mentions, it only comprises about a tenth of all of the letters Dr. Sacks wrote; he was an inveterate, compulsive logophile who wrote nonstop on napkins, pads, notebooks, and anything else within reach. (W. H. Auden, an early champion and long-time friend of Sacks, addressed him in print with the honorific “Dr.”; I gladly follow it here.)
By LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
The Jersey Shore, NJ, USA
During the Drought
During the drought, we traded water
for wine. Let our plants wither, stopped
doing laundry. Learned to shudder
at the smell of fire. Hoped
it was just some asshole with a chiminea. Every
impostor cloud was suspect: steam rising
Translated from the German by MELODY MAKEDA LEDWON
Translator’s Note
“I need you to translate my book. You’re the person I would ask,” Simoné said to me as we sat on a panel about intersectionality and translation at the Translationale Berlin in the winter of 2023. We laughed briefly at how she had managed to weave this translation proposal into her response to a question about challenges in the German translation industry. Honored, intrigued, a bit nervous, I accepted.
Messer, Zungen, written primarily in German, explores how the erasure of Black people and people of color from the culture of remembrance within the Cape Coloured community in South Africa, also known as Camissa, is intimately tied to their displacement from ancestral lands and historic communal sites. Resisting racial violence, reclaiming memory, history and language therefore involves both returning to lost places and being resilient in hostile spaces. I found the role of language in this context particularly fascinating. The characters speak, remember, and experience their worlds in multiple languages, including Sesotho, English and Afrikaans, creating a mosaic of languages. In my initial draft of “Choir” and “Motherness,” I focused on how to recreate this rich tapestry of language in translation. As I began to revise, and consult with SGL and several colleagues, I concluded that it was most important to respect the characters’ language choices. Above all, I sought to capture the commonplace reality of multilingual worlds and communities. SGL adeptly portrays these realities in her novel without explaining them or making them more palatable to an imagined external audience. In contrast to the original, where passages written in English stand out, in the translation they seamlessly blend into the main language of the text, resulting in a new language mosaic.
—Melody Makeda Ledwon
By BEN TAMBURRI
Photo courtesy of author
Baileys Harbor, WI
Baileys Harbor has always felt like a place that is eternally old, eternally in the past. It is a destination for quiet summers on the Wisconsin peninsula, where the insignia of range lights and lighthouses decorate the bathroom of every home, and Dala horses wreath the doors. It was the place of my youth, even if it was only for a week each year. As a kid, when my family visited, I felt at home among the retired condo-dwellers.
By CARSON WOLFE
The morning after I had woken to him
holding his flashlight beneath my bedsheets,
I told him I felt too sick to go to school.
It’s always confused me, why I chose
to stay in his house another full day,
waiting for my mother to finish work.
Like any other, we played chess
just like he’d taught me, and he let me win.
Something broken and unnameable
hanging between us—perhaps it is me,
writing this poem, watching myself
shrink as a ten-year-old, watching him
sacrifice another pawn. From this angle,
it occurs to me, after all these years,
that he knew I was going to tell.
And now I am afraid for that little girl.
How much easier it all could have been
had I tripped at the top of the stairs.
It must have crossed his mind
as those silent hours came to a close.
He didn’t reach over the gear stick
to rub my thigh on the drive home,
only stared out at the barriers
as we crossed Barton Bridge.
I always believed him
to be pathetic, a coward of a man,
but we pulled up outside my mum’s house
and he opened the door, let me out.
CARSON WOLFEis a Mancunian poet and the grand prize winner of the 2024 DISQUIET International Literary Prize. Their work has appeared with Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, and Rattle, amongst others. Their new book Coin Laundry at Midnight is forthcoming with Button Poetry in spring 2026.
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