Aidan Cooper

Excerpt from What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison

September 22, 2026 Nonfiction

By ALICE MATTISON and JANE KENYON
Edited by CHAD WRIGLESWORTH

Introduction by Alice Mattison

Jane Kenyon grew up across the road from a farm in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After she studied poetry with Donald Hall at the university there, they became friends and then married. He was from Connecticut, but had spent childhood summers on his grandparents’ farm in central New Hampshire. In 1975, Jane and Don went to live in that New Hampshire farmhouse.

After seeing a poem by Jane Kenyon, I ordered her first book, From Room to Room, published in 1978 by Alice James Books. At that time the press was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, publishing only New England poets, preferably women. It was a cooperative: the poets ran the publishing house with just one paid employee. Poets figured out policy, worked in the office, saw their books through the process of publication, and chose the next books to be printed.

I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, writing poems—sometimes stories—teaching part-time, looking after three small children. My husband, Edward, was a legal aid lawyer. When my own book of poems was chosen by Alice James in 1979, it was a particular thrill to meet Jane Kenyon. Putting in time at the office, we became friends.

Chupacabra

September 3, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By RODRIGO URQUIOLA FLORES
Translated by SHAINA BRASSARD

Story appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note
It is a pleasure to share my translation of this short story from contemporary Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores. This semi-autobiographical work of fiction transports the reader to the windswept edges of the city of La Paz during the early and mid-1990s, when young children like the author and myself were cognizant of the mysterious and feared chupacabra as a topic of conversation and media coverage.

The story is part cataloging of the author’s first significant experiences and memories. Thrillingly, the narrator takes us on a journey from the neglect and loneliness of his spare, dusty home to the high drama of the soccer stadium. It is nothing short of a revelation. In this third space, he finds seemingly all the raw materials of life: effort, teamwork, luck, heartbreak, agony, triumph, relief.

Through the storytelling of his Aymara grandmother, Urquiola also takes us back in time to the Ocobaya hacienda, a site of subjugation and domination. I have resisted translating – and therefore decontextualizing – pongo, patrón, and amo, the unique terms of racialized power associated with this social and economic system. Curious readers are invited to learn more about haciendas, a significant feature of not-so-distant Latin American history with meaningful connections to the plantation system of the United States.

August Poetry Feature

August 27, 2026 Poetry

New poems from MARCUS WICKER and ELLEN HINSEY

Table of Contents:

Selections from Dear Mothership by Marcus Wicker
Selections from Anatomy of the Eclipse by Ellen Hinsey

What if an alien landed in Atlanta in January 2020 and tried to document everything it saw for two years? Not just the big stuff like the pandemic, the protests, the Capitol riot, but also the unfiltered everyday occurrences: binge-watching reality t.v. and some retail therapy, a young girl quieting her wailing sister in the middle of an airport Popeye’s with a kiss to her invisibly injured elbow. That’s the premise of Dear Mothership, the new poetry collection from Marcus Wicker (Ecco, September 8). Part Afrofuturist odyssey, part cultural chronicle, the collection weaves the ATLien emissary’s observations together as it examines what is alien in our world, alongside poems that chart upheavals both personal and political.

Mon Petit Bois

August 26, 2026 Dispatches

By LYS GRANIER

Photo courtesy of the author.

Montréal, Québec, Canada

Le petit bois a brûlé. Le petit bois a brûlé. Where I went to pick up asparagus in the spring. Where I saw a dead mole on the path and cried for hours. Where we had that secret patch of mushrooms. Des petits gris, my parents called them. Where the pines smelled of summer and safety. Where I went for my first walk in the snow. The only time I saw the woods in the snow. Where I threw a handful of road gravel in the tiny stream every time I crossed the bridge. The wood where I pictured my dad reincarnated as a fox. Where we had to wear red and be loud during hunting season. Where boars would dig up moss on the side of the path.

The Loneliest Island

August 20, 2026 Essays

By KATY SIMPSON SMITH

In the middle of the Mediterranean, 50 miles from Sicily, 200 miles from Libya, floats a country whose general character has been defined by centuries of accretion and erasure.

This is the island that played host to this spring’s newest reality dating show, Love Overboard, in which sixteen sculpted young people battle for connection and status on a luxury yacht. The yacht, and the people, mostly float off the coast, though the golden sandstone of capital city Valletta looms behind them. The guiding myth of such shows is that a beautiful locale—sunny, cloistered, preferably bare of culture—is conducive to love.

The reality of Malta is that it’s the loneliest place I’ve been.

On this arid soil—not a river to be found on the entire island—forces as mythic as Ottomans and Knights Hospitaller met to make their case for dominion; Byzantines came, Arabs, the French. The resulting language, born of this crossroads aesthetic, seems to blend the insistence of Italian and the lilt of Arabic, though most islanders also speak English, which feels—like the red telephone boxes dotting the capital—vestigial.

Baleia

August 18, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By GRACILIANO RAMOS
Translated by MILA MASSAKI GOMES

Translator’s Note
In Portuguese, “Baleia” means whale. Baleia… how funny it had seemed to me when I first encountered Graciliano Ramos’s work — a dog named “Whale.” It isn’t, of course, a simple or even silly name. In this short story, excerpted from the famous Brazilian novel Vidas Secas (1938), we follow a dog as she lives out her last miserable, heart-wrenching moments. Starved, thirsty, and rabid, Baleia is no more than a limping bag of bones to an outsider’s eyes. It is ironic: a skinny, limping dog, easily killed, named after an enormous, powerful, and beautiful animal. The deserted, scorched, barren land is home to a dog named after a sea creature. The end of her life, though brutal, is an act of mercy out in the arid backlands where she lives. While canid, Baleia is a reflection of her human family — migrants, alone in the backlands, fighting hunger, drought, sickness, and the threat of a gun held by an authority that sees people in the vast, desert lands as no more than sick animals to be killed. As she dies, Baleia dreams of an abundance she lacks, an abundance of care, joy, love, and food. Many people feel empathy for dying dogs — their deaths are hard and painful to read. With “Baleia,” I imagine Graciliano Ramos turning this empathy around to the Brazilian elite living near the coast. His story asks, “What would be of the world if we felt the same empathy we feel for dogs for the people who share this land with us?”

Podcast: Lauren Delapenha on “Supermarketing”

August 14, 2026 Audio, Issue 31, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Lauren Delapenha Podcast

LAUREN DELAPENHA speaks to EMILY EVERETT about her poems “Supermarketing” and “If You Are Learning English,” which appear in The Common’s spring issue. Lauren also discusses her process and revision methods, her time at the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, and how balancing both teaching and writing challenges her.

Lauren is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and two Pushcart nominations. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut.

Read Lauren’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/Lauren-Delapenha.

Learn more about her work at laurendelapenha.com.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. In 2025 her debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese’s Book Club pick, and her work appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column. Previous publications include the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

What We’re Reading: July 2026

July 24, 2026 Reviews

Curated by AIDAN COOPER

While many lounge into the soft heat of these summer months — leaning back, feet up, a cold drink in one hand — The Common’s editorial assistants have been perched on the edge of their seats, hunched over stories large and suspenseful. In this edition of What We’re Reading, interrogate boatfuls of questionable characters; restage plays sparking with historical intellect; ride alongside mercenaries galivanting in the Brazilian backlands; and balance on a tightrope of familial love above the darkness of half-remembered myth. Here, AIDAN CAHILL, BEN TAMBURRI, CAMILA MASSAKI GOMES, AMAYA RANATUNGE, and I have been reading stories that epitomize summer’s intensity: flowering with fruitful prose and hurtling by at a landslide pace.

Announcing The Common’s Seventh Literary Editorial Fellow

July 14, 2026 News and Events

(Amherst, Mass. July 14, 2026)—Award-winning, international literary journal The Common has announced Aidan Cooper ’26 as its seventh Literary Editorial Fellow. The fellowship launched in 2020 with support from the Whiting Foundation and is sustained by the generosity of Amherst College alumni donors.

The Literary Editorial Fellowship (LEF) was introduced with three goals in mind: to strengthen the bridge between The Common’s existing Literary Publishing Internship (LPI) for undergraduates and the professional publishing world; to provide real-world literary experience for an Amherst graduate, transferable to a wide range of fields; and to increase the capacity of The Common’s publishing and programming operations.

What We’re Reading: June 2026

June 19, 2026 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

As summer opens up before us, as we shake off our winter blankets and spring raincoats, writers and readers alike are flocking outside to drink in the long-awaited sunlight. Summer is the season of remembering how it feels to be a member of the world — this strange world of pollen and sneezes, of hot adirondack chairs and sweat, of cool waterfronts and sand between your toes. In these recommendations from RUSSELL BRAKEFIELD, TERESE SVOBODA, and STEFAN BINDLEY-TAYLOR, characters similarly discover where they fit and falter in their surroundings, and how they transform the worlds they inhabit. From cityscape to household, these stories traverse landscapes large and small, and one might just land in your summer-reading stack.

Aidan Cooper

Aidan Cooper

Excerpt from What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison

Chupacabra

August Poetry Feature

Mon Petit Bois

The Loneliest Island

Baleia

Podcast: Lauren Delapenha on “Supermarketing”

What We’re Reading: July 2026

Announcing The Common’s Seventh Literary Editorial Fellow

What We’re Reading: June 2026

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