Book by KERRIN MCCADDEN
Reviewed by
Kerrin McCadden’s poignant debut collection of poetry, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, is filled with composed wisdom for how to cope with separation in general, and divorce in particular. The collection won the New Issues Poetry Prize in 2014, and McCadden’s poetry has appeared widely in Best American Poetry 2012,American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
As we begin 2015, our recommenders are heading into the wilderness. These books range widely through time and space, each embracing its own unique heart of contradiction—exile and home; passion and failure; reason and chaos; doubt and confidence. Heavy with both fictional biography and memoir, we bring you familiar faces from the dark woods of alienation and obsession. Dive into the new year with these five maps by which to recognize yourself and find a path through the forest.
Recommended:
The Same Roads Back by Frank Dullaghan, The Season of Migration by Nellie Hermann, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson
Book by MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN
Reviewed by
Fans of Megan Mayhew Bergman’s first short-story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, which appeared in 2012, have been looking forward to her second collection ever since. The premise of Bergman’s new book, Almost Famous Women, is immediately intriguing. Bergman culled through the annals of history to locate women who brushed up against fame, thanks to proximity to famous people or now-forgotten accomplishments. Publisher’s Weekly commended her for this “feminist reclamation” of narratives largely ignored; a compilation of 13 fictionalized tales of women including James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia; Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy in “Gone with the Wind”; Allegra Byron, Lord Byron’s cast-off daughter; and Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s impetuous, drug-addled, niece.
Book by RICHARD FLANAGAN
Reviewed by
A bee
Staggers out
Of the peony.
Richard Flanagan’s new novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, begins with an enigmatic haiku by Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet, which evokes a state of sublime consummation or mortal exhaustion, in other words, how love and war, beauty and horror are inextricably entwined.
Flanagan has explored these opposites of the human condition in three previous novels, set in Van Dieman’s Land, now the island of Tasmania, off the coast of New Zealand. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the 2014 winner of the Man Booker Prize, and in Flanagan’s other work, this remote, timeless region is his equivalent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Marquez’s Macondo, a mythic terrain in which he explores the resilience and courage of the human spirit.
The Review Review gives Issue 04 five stars, saying it “seamlessly blends style, presentation, and experimentation with pieces that celebrate the universal human experiences of love, loneliness, heartbreak, and anxiety.”
The Faster Times reviews the first issue of The Common, celebrating the magazine as a “place for the placeless.”
The Millions‘ Tiffany Gilbert writes about The Common in the City party on Tumblr.
NewPages reviews Issue 00 in advance of our official debut, describing The Common‘s prose and poetry as “polished, refined, and serious.”
This month’s recommendations from The Common’s contributors and staff deal with the intersection of old and new, ancient and modern, on every level—personal, religious, political, even supernatural. Perhaps in the spirit of the season, we seem preoccupied by stories of intergenerational strife, love, and ambition. In their urgent focus on belief and truth-seeking, these books represent a literature of searching, a catalogue of quests across time and around the world.
Recommended:
To the End of June by Cris Beam, The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz, We Others by Steven Millhauser, Hum by Jamaal May, High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire.
Books by WENDY S. WALTERS and TIMOTHY LIU
Reviewed by
J. Mae Barizo reviews two poetry collections: Troy, Michigan by Wendy S. Walters and Don’t Go Back to Sleep by Timothy Liu.
TROY, MICHIGAN
Wendy S. Walter’s Troy, Michigan chronicles municipal and personal history in this elliptically elegant collection of sonnets. This book swivels gracefully through eras in the city of the title, alluding to its mythic namesake while divulging the narrator’s observations on industry, race, and the tug of the natural world. Walters spent 15 years of her childhood in Troy, which is in close proximity of Lake Huron and Lake Erie; her father worked for General Motors.
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