Kanchi Sharma (left) and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (right)
KANCHI SHARMA and YU-MEI BALASINGAMCHOW first connected despite the limits of time zones – Kanchi in Mumbai, Yu-Mei in Boston. Years after seeing each other in pixels, they met in person at AWP. Bringing it full-circle, they met over Zoom to discuss Yu-Mei’s debut novel, Names Have Been Changed, its masterful portrayal of modern exiles, diaspora, concealment, and the quiet violences of bureaucracy and border.
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.
By LIZ JOHNSTON and EOGHAN WALLS
Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU
It’s hard to fight for other organisms and remain on speaking terms with humanity. People don’t care about extinction. What’s one species, they say, compared to my precious convenience? Trees and birds do their bit for the ecosystem merely by existing. Humans are uniquely selfish and destructive. Come to think of it, maybe we’re the expendable species.
Two timely new novels, The Fall-Down Effect, Canadian writer and Brick magazine editor Liz Johnston’s debut, and Field Notes from an Extinction by Northern Irish poet and novelist Eoghan Walls, center on those who risk their lives—and other people’s—for nature. Both books ask what makes a person willing to go that far. Nature? Nurture? What’s the tipping point? Why now?
The protagonists in these books have suffered family traumas that harden them to distractions like love, and they share reclusive personalities, as well as a mix of megalomania and desperation. The Fall-Down Effect’s protagonist says: Enough thinking. Now. The main character of Field Notes says: A species is dying. The world needs to know.
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?”
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.
By ANA PRUNDARU
Phone Booth Pantoum
Konstanz, Germany
remember, it was the nineties
yours was born from homesickness
a tiny fit of existentialism
a glass confessional, dressed in farewell deliriums
yours was born from homesickness
before you scrolled, hearted and liked
dressed a glass confessional in farewell deliriums
windows cracked open as fortune cookies
Eve Alexandra (left) and Sarah Audsley (right)
SARAH AUDSLEY and EVE ALEXANDRA, both poets based in Vermont, share a complicated connection to the landscape and the place they call home. Each leverages the pastoral; however, both poets upend the pastoral’s tradition to explore identity, gender, familial relationships, grief, and their connection (or dislocation) to place. None of Us in White, recipient of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize and published in 2025, is Eve Alexandra’s second poetry collection. Carl Phillips’ quotation, “Brokenness you do surprise me,” is the epigraph with which Alexandra introduces and envisions her collection as it investigates grief and reaches towards elegy with an unsettled sense of belonging.
By SHATADAL MITRA
Translated by BISHNUPRIYA CHOWDHURI
Piece appears below in English. Click here to read the original in Bengali.
Translator’s Note
I believe what makes stories great is their ability to surprise and hearten their readers simultaneously. The tale of Khanandihi, which revolves around a quintessential Bengal village as it lives through generations of transformation— social, economic, and ethical—does so with an unparalleled efficacy that deserves a global readership. The narrative defies linearity, both in its language and in its structure. As a result, past and present run interwoven into each other, endowing even the smallest characters with a cosmic expanse and scope. The text resists rushed reading—its layers of long, winding sentences and subtle subtextual nuances unlock only when savored.
New poems from AMIYA MORETTA, EMILY MARIE PASSOS DUFFY, JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ, and JOHN KINSELLA.
Table of Contents:
By AIDAN CAHILL
Photo courtesy of the author.
Boise, Idaho
It is late afternoon, and the June sun flirts with descent like a nervous pool diver. The foothills to my back are sprayed white-gold, as is Riverstone, my old K-12 school just across the cheatgrass field to my right. Its concrete panel walls and sawtoothed roof are a familiar reminder of years subjected to exam booklets and wormish spaghetti. From above, Riverstone looks like a proud X, and since I graduated two years ago, that is the only angle I have witnessed it from. I catch it for fleeting seconds before my plane plunges into the clouds, destined for college 3,000 miles east.
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