Before we close out another busy year of publishing, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the unique, resonant, and transporting pieces that made 2024 memorable. The Common published over 175 stories, essays, poems, interviews, and features online and in print in 2024. Below, you can browse a list of the ten most-read pieces of 2024 to get a taste of what left an impact on readers.
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January 2024 Poetry Feature: Part I, with work by Adrienne Su, Eleanor Stanford, Kwame Opoku-Duku, and William Fargason
“I wrote this poem on Holy Saturday, which historically is the day after Jesus was crucified, and the day before he was resurrected. That Spring, I was barely out of a nervous breakdown in which I had intense suicidal ideation … The moments of quiet during a time like that take on more meaning somehow, reminders I was still alive. And that day, that Saturday, I saw a bee.”
—William Fargason on “Holy Saturday”
The Shirt by David Ryan
He fingers the cloth, imagines the fingers of a millworker feeding the cord into a sewing machine, shuddering wooden bobbins in some industrial town. And then he tries it on.
Dispatch from Moscow by Afton Montgomery
A toddler in a blue t-shirt cocked a pistol at me. Silver glinted in October sun. He clicked the trigger, Dad and Mom looking on. Got her is what the kid said to Dad, a man closer to seven feet tall than six.
October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors, with work by Nathaniel Perry and Tyler Kline
“These poems are ‘versions’ of the psalms—or more accurately, they are poems that freely borrow phases from the King James versions of the psalms and think on some of the themes. [They take] place in the fictional setting I’m calling The Olive Garden (not the restaurant)—a kind of grove and adjacent town where the speaker has been sent by something resembling God.”
—Nathaniel Perry on “34 (Song, with Young Lions)” and “36 (Song, with Contranym)”
Silk Road by Nieves García Benito, translated by Carmela Ferradans
Rashad Brahim is in “no man’s land”: that stony and rough place in between Castillejos and Sebta in northern Morocco, facing the Spanish border. Born in Dosso, in southern Nigeria, he was now twenty-two years old and had always wanted to leave his homeland. How he and his friends, Abdellah Salim and Abderrahim Zinder, have come this far is a mystery.
The Con Artist by Glenn Bertram
—Glenn Bertram
November 2024 Poetry Feature, with work by G.C. Waldrep, Allison Funk, and Kevin O’Connor
“The sound of the two shoals at Glendale [South Carolina]—the Upper and Lower—is a particular sound, a peculiar sound. Sound is real, but not real in the same way matter, as matter, is real. And we don’t see sound, which seems wrong, somehow—within the tyranny of seeing.”
— G.C. Waldrep on “Below the Shoals, Glendale”
Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar
“When my dear friend Carrie was looking for someone to do this interview, I jumped at the chance. I loved her first book, Special Education, and was really excited to read Dream of the Lake. The themes of language and identity spoke to me deeply.”
—Raychelle Heath
Woodpecker by Jeffrey Harrison
its head popped up from the hollowed-out stump / like a jack-in-the-box, beak raised / at an angle that looked either jaunty / or quizzical, as though asking something / of us, but not waiting for an answer, / which, in any case, we wouldn’t have had.
More to the Story by Michael David Lukas
For a long time, I told myself that it was the feeling of the thing that mattered, the refraction of truth if not the truth itself. Then I got that email from Uncle Herb—‘There’s more to the story than you might think’—and emotional truth wasn’t nearly enough. Not by a long shot. I needed to know where those Nazi medals came from.
Thanks for a great year! We’re excited to continue sharing work by writers all over the world with you in 2025. Keep up with the art, prose, and poetry we publish each week by subscribing to our newsletter!
