What We’re Reading

All posts tagged: What We’re Reading

What We’re Reading: August 2025

August 22, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

The summer months for The Common’s staff have been filled with wandering, around Western Massachusetts and beyond. Throughout this wandering, we’ve carried books which roam themselves, where relationships parallel the movements of the landscapes they traverse. Editorial Assistants BEN TAMBURRI, LUCHIK BELAU- LORBERG, and CLARA CHIU, and Applefield Fellow AIDAN COOPER recommend three novels and a poetry collection which brought them solace during these long, sweltry days.

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, recommended by David Applefield ’78 Fellow Aidan Cooper

Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand audiobooks. There’s something about the pace or the performances that irks me, or maybe it’s something about being slightly insoluble in the story, while I drive, or fold laundry, or task my hands with whatever it is that isn’t turning a page. For me, reading has always been about following and, more importantly, re-following where the words before me lead; I flip here and there, underline and annotate, and generally meander through and indulge in the language’s turns. But because this summer has been one interwoven with travel, tugged along by the two yellow lines in our potholed New England roads, I decided (betraying my brand) to put O Pioneers! by Willa Cather through my car radio.

What We’re Reading: July 2025

July 18, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

This July, ELIZABETH METZGER, NINA SEMCZUK, and SEÁN CARLSON bring you ruminations on what it feels like to return—to home, to memory, to oneself. As they make sense of their own lives through a poetry collection, novel, and essay collection, their recommendations invite us to contemplate what it means to exist within both change and stillness, and how time itself can wander and fragment.

Fanny Howe’s The Lyrics, recommended by Issue 24 Contributor Elizabeth Metzger

It’s early July, and I’m in the middle of moving back to the East Coast. Right now, a few days after the death of the poet Fanny Howe, I am reading her collection The Lyrics, on a screened porch in the late afternoon in the Berkshires, watching geese gather on a tiny red dock. I can hear the voices of parents across the pond teaching their children to fish, to let the fish go. I’m appreciating the element of air as I remember it from childhood, a sort of thickening all around me that feels wearable, welcoming, at times oppressive, a return to an old life from the other side.

What We’re Reading: June 2025

June 20, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD and KEI LIM

This month’s recommendations depart to new and old worlds, and explore what we can bring back from them. With CHRISTOPHER AYALA’s recommendation we find ourselves among magic and aliens alike, with CHRISTY TENDING’s we return to Mussolini-era Italy, and with MARIAH RIGG’s we are brought to a climate-ravaged future. Read on to traverse these collections of stories and essays.

Cover of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki

Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears; recommended by TC Online Contributor Christopher Ayala

I’ve taken up the habit of hitting independent bookshops wherever I travel and buying the first interesting book I see, eschewing the never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover adage and one-hundred percent judging a book by its cover. Good design suggests to me a deeper, more thoughtful curation on behalf of the press, that a book itself is an art object whose cover is a deep and personal aesthetic representing the work of the writer and the work of the press. This is exactly how I found myself in Tucson Arizona’s Antigone Books, where I was led into Verso Books’ edition of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan.

What We’re Reading: May 2025

May 23, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The summer months, with their sprawling days, coax us to explore new literary worlds. If you’re not reading Issue 29—which features short stories from Hawai‘i, Kenya, Baton Rouge, and an Austin boxing gym—these recommendations from its contributors TERESE SVOBODA, NICOLE COOLEY, and BILL COTTER will help to revive the childhood magic of summer reading. Read on to discover poetry and prose titles that give permission, immortalize, and remind us how “fiercely beautiful” words can be.

Molly Giles’ Lifespan and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Terese Svoboda

Molly Giles’ 2024 memoir, Lifespan or the novel The Swan Book published in 2013 by Alexis Wright? The first is a perfectly wrought, very moving series of flash pieces of a life experienced above, under, around, and on the Golden Gate Bridge. The second is a wildly inventive, messy novel about the love of Australian black swans by a rebellious woman abducted from a swamp to be the wife of the Australian president. I won’t choose.

What We’re Reading: April 2025

April 18, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring.

Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman

I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.

What We’re Reading: March 2025

March 21, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

In this special edition of the column, JAY BOSS RUBIN shares a mini review of ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’s Theft, freshly released on Tuesday, March 18. JEANNE BONNER follows him with a novel that bears witness to the modern world from a very different angle, at the close of Nazi rule in France.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft; recommended by TC Online Contributor Jay Boss Rubin

The new novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft, is his first since he received the phone call informing him he’d been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Its titular theft is open to interpretation. The plot turns decisively on an accusation of stealing. Many references to historical thievery are woven into the narrative. But the book’s most unforgettable thefts may be the central characters’ encroachments—those committed and those just contemplated—on one another’s dignity.

What We’re Reading: February 2025

February 21, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

This month, contributors KATHARINE HALLS, THEA MATTHEWS, and OLGA ZILBERBOURG take your reading lists to Prague, Damascus, and New York City with four poetry and fiction recommendations that are wholly absorbing, in their stories and settings alike.

Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, trans. Paul Wilson; recommended by TC Online Contributor Olga Zilberbourg

What We’re Reading: January 2025

January 24, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

As we’re finding our footing in 2025 and, in the U.S., shoring up against new political realities, January has been pervaded by a sense of uncertainty. The books our community is reading right now seem to respond to this feeling, in areas of life spanning from assimilation to cooking anxiety. Read on for recommendations from our contributors AFTON MONTGOMERY, HEMA PADHU, and ADRIENNE SU that just might help to stabilize your spirits—or, at the very least, provide some quality distraction.

Miriam Ungerer’s Good Cheap Food and Margaret Eby’s You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible; recommended by Issue 28 Poet Adrienne Su

When working on my last book of poems, Peach State (2021), I often wrote my way to the kitchen: writing about a dish made me want to cook it. These days, I’m cooking my way to the proverbial typewriter. I read about food. Then I cook something I’ve read about, and the process nudges me to fill a page.

Holiday Reads 2024

December 17, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

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.