News & Events | Page 116 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Excerpt from Private Means

August 11, 2020 Fiction

The wine finally whittling at the burr of her thoughts, Alice read descriptions and assessed fabric content before selecting her size. Partial to leafy green and navy blue, cautious of dressing as a lamb when she knew she was close to mutton and yet not ready for Eileen Fisher–baggy old lady, her fifty-one years compounded the shopping challenge her considerable height posed. Even if she wasn’t actually buying, the clothes must potentially fit if the process were to give her any satisfaction. The virtual acquisition required less than possession but more than pure abstraction. The clothes and shoes and bags must be plausible purchases were she to decide to purchase them—always a possibility. But not even wine, an empty apartment, the tiresome BBC drama of Brexit unpardonably mixed with the devastating news of another Ebola outbreak overlain with repeated clicks of not-quite-complete acquisition could keep her from thinking about the dog.

Friday Reads: August 2020

August 7, 2020 Reviews

Curated by ISABEL MEYERS

Welcome back to Friday Reads! After a brief hiatus, we are returning with books that have educated and entertained our former TC interns during quarantine. To find out what our former editorial assistants have been doing to pass the long days inside, read on.

Recommendations: The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong; Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid; Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Amplifying Black Voices on TC Online II

August 5, 2020 News and Events

This is the second installment of an online series highlighting work by Black authors published in The Common. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.

July 2020 Poetry Feature: Steven Leyva and Elizabeth Scanlon

July 31, 2020 Poetry

New poems by STEVEN LEYVA and ELIZABETH SCANLON

Table of contents:

Steven Leyva

Ear Hustle
Gorgoneion: Ft Worth

Elizabeth Scanlon

This Thing

Statue

July 29, 2020 Dispatches

By LISA WILLIAMSON ROSENBERG

The Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York

On a crisp fall day in 1974, you are walking with your third-grade class up Central Park West to the museum. You smell the hot pretzels just before the statue comes into view. You want to pass by quickly in an effort to avoid the poop from flocking pigeons, but your best friend and partner for the trip, who is white and blond, slows your pace and squeezes your hand. She is frowning up at the statue, red-cheeked, the way she gets when she is angry.

“How come the Black man and the Indian man don’t get horses too? They’re just as good as the white guy.”

Reading Black Voices: TC Staff Picks III

July 27, 2020 Reviews

This is the third in a series of features highlighting the Black writers our editors and staff have been reading. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.

Recommendations: Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, White Girls by Hilton Als

Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman

Recommended by Elizabeth Witte, Associate Editor

Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim is a sort of linguo-geographical exploration of place (cityscape, restaurant, beach, etc.,) and of the characters, the voices that populate these places, that move through, and act or are acted upon within each scene.

Notes on Camp: 2020

July 22, 2020 Essays

By VAL WANG

“John jumped.”

I had no idea what the short sentence meant, only that it came from the Bible and when I said it, all the other campers in my Bible study group laughed and I was off the hook for answering any more questions about God, Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, none of which I knew anything about.

Amplifying Black Voices on TC Online

July 20, 2020 News and Events

This is the first installment of an online series highlighting work by Black authors published in The Common. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.

July 2020 Poetry Feature: Loren Goodman

July 17, 2020 Poetry

New poems by LOREN GOODMAN

Please welcome back long-time TC contributor Loren Goodman.

Table of Contents:

—G-d in a Cup

—Dear Jeremy

—Due to the Light

—Dolphin Facts

Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

Review: The Illness Lesson

July 16, 2020 Reviews

Book by CLARE BEAMS

Review by ETHAN CHATAGNIER

The events of Clare Beams’ debut novel, The Illness Lesson, start with the founding of a school for girls in 19th-century New England, but the novel begins just before that with an omen. A flock of mysterious red birds visits the Massachusetts estate of Samuel Hood for the first time since the collapse of his previous social experiment decades earlier, a failed agricultural commune called the Birch Hill Consociation. Some find the birds beautiful, but to Samuel’s daughter, Caroline, their “shape might be a red so bright and so unexpected, so unlike the colors of her life, that it held a violence.” Samuel is a noted idealist in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he, Caroline, and his acolyte David live off the income of his Transcendentalist essays. The girls’ school is an attempt to prove his latest hypothesis: that girls can be ushered into the world of ideas as easily as boys.