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Holiday Reads 2024

December 17, 2024 Reviews

Exploring migration from the perspective of plants; mystical historical fiction that will transport you from New England to Haiti; and one woman’s chance to do life over again.

We revisited our community’s favorite reads from throughout the year and compiled a list of memoirs, essay collections, novels, and creative nonfiction works to inspire a diverse holiday reading list, or kick off your reading plans for the new year. All of these titles were originally highlighted in our “What We’re Reading” and Book Reviews columns, and we think they deserve a second spotlight. Read on for recommendations from the Phoenix desert, the Indian subcontinent, the seaside, and more.

Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For

A poetic memoir-in-essays about Parker’s struggle to live freely amid the omnipresent legacy of enslavement in America. Beginning with her childhood as the only Black girl in a conservative, religious town, Parker moves between wide-ranging topics—including everything from cop killings, to plantation tours, to therapy and Jay-Z—but frames it all with the motif of the slave ship.

What We’re Reading: December 2024

December 13, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

If you’re in need of a deep breath amid the holiday frenzy, look no further. This month, Issue 28 poets and longtime TC contributors OLENA JENNINGS and ELIZABETH HAZEN bring you three recommendations that force you to slow down and observe. Hazen’s picks provide an intimate window into the paradoxical, tragic, and sometimes ridiculous characters that inhabit our world, while Jennings’ holds up a mirror to readers, asking them to meditate on the act of viewing itself.

Chantal V. Johnson’s Post-Traumatic and Kate Greathead’s The Book of George; recommended by Issue 28 Contributor Elizabeth Hazen

Typically, I have a few books going at once, and I am almost always at the very least reading one physical book and listening to another. Often, the pairings reveal interesting connections, and my most recent reads—Kate Greathead’s latest, The Book of George, and Chantal V. Johnson’s debut, Post-Traumatic—did not disappoint.

Both books are contemporary, the former out just this October, the latter in 2022, and feature protagonists who are deeply flawed but trying to figure out who they are. They hail from starkly different backgrounds, though, and this determines the starkly different difficulties they encounter as they navigate adulthood.

What We’re Reading: November 2024

November 22, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

With the holidays coming up, many of us turn to books for company on cold nights, or a respite from the stress of the season. If you’re craving an escape into the world of ideas, look no further! This month, our contributors DOUGLAS KOZIOL, CARSON WOLFE, and ANGIE MACRI deliver an eclectic mix of nonfiction and poetry recommendations sure to satisfy and inspire the curious reader.

Nick Pinkerton’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn; recommended by Issue 28 contributor Douglas Koziol

Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn is, in one sense, an elegy to a type of moviegoing no longer possible. Set in a single-screen Taipei theater on its final night, as it plays the 1967 wuxia (a Chinese martial arts subgenre) classic, Dragon Inn, to a handful of people, it would be easy to read the film as overly sentimental or nostalgic. But Nick Pinkerton resists this temptation in his book on the film, which treats the concerns of Goodbye, Dragon Inn with a wonderfully discursive and prismatic critical eye.

What We’re Reading: October 2024

October 18, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

This month, our online contributors CHRIS JOHN POOLE, JULES FITZ GERALD, and LAURA NAGLE recommend three inventive, deeply human books with stories that traverse two oceans—from Japan, to Mexico, to Norway.

Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami (trans. Sophie Hughes); recommended by TC Online Contributor Chris John Poole

In her author’s note to This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor writes that “to live in a city is to live among stories.” The city in question is Veracruz, Melchor’s birthplace, a city of cartel violence and political corruption; ritual magic and cold, hard truth. Veracruz’s stories, meanwhile, are those which are gleaned from—and imposed onto—its grim realities.

The stories in This Is Not Miami are crónicas, a genre with no direct equivalent in the Anglophone canon. Crónicas mix reportage and fiction, in a manner akin to gonzo journalism. They favour subjective accounts and firsthand experience over hard data and rigid chronology. Melchor’s crónicas collate rumours, folk myths, and personal narratives, injecting reportage where necessary.

Review: The Extinction of Irena Rey

May 27, 2024 Reviews

By JENNIFER CROFT
Review by CHRIS JOHN POOLE

At first, the autobiographical roots of The Extinction of Irena Rey seem simple to trace. This is a novel by writer-translator Jennifer Croft, who works in Spanish and Polish; its protagonist is a Spanish writer-translator. This is a novel from the acclaimed translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights; the eponymous Irena Rey is a Polish literary megastar. This is a novel from a staunch advocate for translators’ visibility; its eight main characters are all translators who seek—and perhaps supplant–their elusive muse.

Yet it is the very abundance of extratextual parallels that makes it so difficult to situate Croft within her text. Unlike Croft’s debut Homesick, a hybrid novel-memoir, The Extinction of Irena Rey provides no single stand-in for its author; instead, a network of interlinked characters echo Croft’s own life. From the novel’s tantalising biographical parallels, countless questions arise: is Irena Rey modelled on Tokarczuk or Croft? Is protagonist Emilia a self-insert, or a novel creation? Ultimately, it seems, these characters are hybridisations of Croft and her influences, as within this novel the lines between self and other, like those between truth and fiction, begin to blur.

Friday Reads: October/November 2023

November 3, 2023 Reviews

Curated by OLIVE AMDUR

As this week of costumes, candy, and spooky Halloween cheer comes to an end, we at The Common are gearing up for the launch of our fall issue! Issue 26—full of vivid poems and prose from all over the world, as well as a special portfolio of writing and art from the migrant farmworker community—launches this coming Monday. After a brief Friday Reads hiatus, to get you excited about the issue, we return this month with recommendations from Issue 26 contributors Ned Balbo and Nora Rodriguez Camagna. Keep reading to see what’s been on their shelves this fall!

Friday Reads: July 2023

July 7, 2023 Reviews

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA and OLIVE AMDUR

The fireworks have finally quieted down, but July has just begun to heat up! Whether you are looking for a book to help you forget the hot weather or a book filled with just as many vivid sensations as the summer season is, keep on reading. In this month’s Friday Reads feature, three of our interns recommend dynamic stories about the nightclubs of the Midwest, a boarding school in coastal Rhode Island, and the tangled relationships of a young person’s body and spirits.

Review of “I Will Not Fold These Maps”

May 30, 2023 Reviews

By MONA KAREEM

Translated from the Arabic by SARA ELKAMEL

Reviewed by SUMMER FARAH

My first encounter with Mona Kareem’s work was not her poetry, but her essay in Poetry Birmingham on the trend of Western poets “translating” from languages they are not literate in. Kareem brings attention to what she calls the “colonial phenomenon of rendition as translation,” in which a poet effectively workshops a rough translation done by a native speaker or someone who is otherwise literate in the original language. Often, this is the only way acclaimed writers reach Western audiences. I was excited, then, to see that I Will Not Fold These Maps, Kareem’s first collection translated to English, defies this trend. Presented with the original Arabic alongside the English translated by Egyptian poet and journalist Sara Elkamel—for whom this work is a debut full-length translation—this book is a mixture of Kareem’s previously collected work alongside brand new poems, presenting a great overview of her work. I Will Not Fold These Maps’s execution as a collaboration between Arab poet-translators only strengthens the experience of reading it, filled with poems that vividly explore exile, grief, and writing and its relationship to resistance.

Friday Reads: April 2023

April 7, 2023 Reviews

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Things are finally warming up here in Western Mass: old snow banks are melting and fuzzy buds are popping up on the trees. Our spring issue—which features a portfolio of stunning fiction from Kuwait, apocalyptic poetry, a Ramadan romance, and a story about a dog in a Texas barrio—launches in just a few short weeks. If you’re wondering where these writers get their inspiration, look no further than this round of Friday Reads.

Cover of Jane Wong's "Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City" with a picture of a colorful crab on beige background.

Present Tense Machine: A Review

November 17, 2022 Reviews

By GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG (Translated from the Norwegian by KARI DICKSON)

Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Laura is expecting a baby. A twenty-four-year-old literature instructor, she lives with her partner Karl Peter in the heart of Bergen, a city in the westernmost part of Norway. She’s suffering from a strange sort of anxiety, which she suspects has something to do with the pregnancy: everything around her seems double, not quite like what it is.

Laura has more common anxieties as well, including a problem with her apartment. The buildings in her part of town are constructed of brick on the outside and wood inside, which makes them so flammable that they’re called “chimney houses.” If their chimney house were to catch on fire, there would be little chance of escape. Then, there are the noisy students living above and below, a drug dealer across the street, hypodermic needles littering the neighborhood. She decides that she and Karl Peter have to move before the baby comes, but this decision, too, seems to bring her nothing but anxiety.