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.
Book by MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Reviewed by
“For a town, it wasn’t such a bad place,” observes Lila, a transient passing through Gilead, who ends up staying to marry an old widowed minister; she’s also the character for whom Marilynne Robinson has titled her most recent novel. Lila is Robinson’s third book to examine the lives and devotions of a small group of characters in this secluded Christian prairie town in Southwest Iowa. While each book is an independent work, shining on its own—Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and Home won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a National Book Award finalist—the overlapping narratives weave a complex tapestry of the human experience as it relates to personal faith.
Book by JOSEPH KERTES
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How to depict human suffering, especially that of children? This question is at the heart of Joseph Kertes’s haunting novel, The Afterlife of Stars, which tells the story of a family fleeing the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary to crush the anti-Communist revolution from the point of view of young Robert Beck, 9.8 years old but “born old,” as his Parisian aunt tells him when she meets him for the first time. Kertes, like Robert, escaped with his family across Europe and eventually settled in Canada, though he was only five at the time. Kertes, whose previous novel, Gratitude, won both the National (U.S.) and Canadian Jewish Book Awards, might have written a memoir, but writing a novel allowed him to tell this story in a lyric, dreamlike prose. This may have been the best way for this author to convey in a literary, adult voice such an early trauma.
Book by JOHN DARNIELLE
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In the early 1990s, John Darnielle set “some of his poetry to music, using a guitar he’d gotten for a few bucks at a nearby strip mall music store. His idea at the time was that eventually his day job would be ‘poet.’ …Young men have all kinds of crazy ideas about what they’re going to end up doing for a living,” says his website bio. He went on to found the popular folk-rock band, The Mountain Goats. Its fans are drawn to Darnielle’s simple instrumentals and powerful lyrics.His song “You Were Cool” sums up his approach and the band’s appeal: “This is a song with the same four chords / I use most of the time / when I’ve got something on my mind / And I don’t want to squander the moment / Trying to come up with a better way / To say what I want to say.”
Now, Darnielle has fulfilled his day-job fantasy in another way—he has written a National Book Award-nominated debut novel, Wolf in White Van. Fans of Darnielle’s music will not be disappointed. Darnielle writes in the poetic, playful tangents characteristic of his lyrics, often grasping at a passing image or emotion and describing it from every angle before rejoining the unfolding story.
Book by TIPHANIE YANIQUE
Reviewed by
It’s hard for anyone to write a magical realist novel today without inviting comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez. Especially in the wake of his death this year, the Colombian literary giant has been mythologized as the master of blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Tiphanie Yanique’s debut novel Land of Love and Drowning is a magical realist work that calls to mind García Márquez, yet still manages to stake out new territory—both geographic and literary.
Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Yanique’s novel is a multigenerational saga.Land of Love and Drowning traces the story of a Virgin Islands family over six decades of the 20th century. The novel opens in 1917, just as the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix are transitioning from Danish to American rule. When a shipwreck kills Captain Owen Arthur Bradshaw, patriarch of the Bradshaw family, and his wife dies soon after, sisters Eeona and Anette are orphaned and forced to fend for themselves. Yanique’s novel follows the lives of these two women as they attempt to work their way out of their newfound poverty, experiencing a string of ill-fated love affairs along the way.
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Celebrating 15 Years