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Inês

JOÃO PEDRO VALA
You know, I’ve never met anyone quite like you before. You don’t draw the universal symbol for asking for the check, you actually sign your name on an invisible vertical paper, you trace the T’s and make that little dot on your I’s, as if someone might accuse you of fraud or something.

Tomato on tomato plant

A Tomato Behind a Glass Cage

SARAH WU
Through the glass, we watch her pour a pale yellow substance from a small white bucket. It splashes against spots of red tomatoes. She’s using urine! the alumna says excitedly. I wonder at how easily this old woman in the glass cage has become foreign. How ancient, and how strange.

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

Cover of Theory & Practice by Michelle de Krester

Review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser

AMBER RUTH PAULEN
One of the brilliances of Michelle de Kretser’s newest novel Theory and Practice is how the author lassoes life’s “messy truths” into a neat and slim book. To do so, de Kretser asks many questions at once: How does shame lead to silence? Why write? What to feel when an idol falls from grace?

Using The Common in my first-year seminars has been fun, fruitful, and helpfully startling for these classes.”

—Martha Cooley, Associate Professor of English, Adelphi University Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »

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