All posts tagged: 2025

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”

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Transcript: Lucas Schaefer Podcast.

LUCAS SCHAEFER speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about his story “Tuesday,” which appears in The Common’s brand new spring issue. “Tuesday” is an excerpt from his novel The Slip, out June 3 from Simon & Schuster; both center on a motley cast of characters at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Lucas talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the novel as a whole, which started over a decade ago as a series of linked short stories. Lucas also discusses how the novel’s central mystery came together, what it was like writing with humor and in so many voices, and how his own experience at an Austin boxing gym inspired the story and its characters.

lucas schaefer next to the common's issue 29 cover

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”
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What We’re Reading: May 2025

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The summer months, with their sprawling days, coax us to explore new literary worlds. If you’re not reading Issue 29—which features short stories from Hawai‘i, Kenya, Baton Rouge, and an Austin boxing gym—these recommendations from its contributors TERESE SVOBODA, NICOLE COOLEY, and BILL COTTER will help to revive the childhood magic of summer reading. Read on to discover poetry and prose titles that give permission, immortalize, and remind us how “fiercely beautiful” words can be.

cover of the swan book

Molly Giles’ Lifespan and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Terese Svoboda

Molly Giles’ 2024 memoir, Lifespan or the novel The Swan Book published in 2013 by Alexis Wright? The first is a perfectly wrought, very moving series of flash pieces of a life experienced above, under, around, and on the Golden Gate Bridge. The second is a wildly inventive, messy novel about the love of Australian black swans by a rebellious woman abducted from a swamp to be the wife of the Australian president. I won’t choose.

What We’re Reading: May 2025
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Fathom

 

Norfolk, Virginia/Virginia Beach, Virginia

 

When the whales wash up on shore, my friend grieves. I feel it too, but it feels further away. Deep in me, treading water, legs furiously churning under the surface. The first whale washes up on the oceanfront, just off the boardwalk. People drive out to stare at it. Its dark wet form deflates into the sand. I dont drive to find it but think of it all day.

I scroll through the Facebook comments that claim its all the fault of the offshore windmills, the sonic waves mapping the ocean floor pummeling through the ocean. Everybody seems to have watched the same hoax-y documentary funded by the oil industry. But of course, its the boats. The whales scarred and torn up by container ships. 165,000 tons of steel running into migration paths.

Fathom
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Crafts Like the Old Country

By NINA SEMCZUK

That morning Irina Pychenko found herself in the ditch, again. It was the fourth time in a month.

“Third time this week I’ve found someone right here,” said the gentleman outside of her window, who was hooking a chain to the tow hitch under the back bumper. She had barely finished mashing her grill into the snow when he’d pulled over. “You wouldn’t believe how many people haven’t got their snow tires on yet.” His words made white puffs in the air, holding his speech like cartoon captions. “You neither,” he said, kicking her half bald Buick tires.

Crafts Like the Old Country
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The Moon as a Beacon of Human Earnestness: A Conversation Between Boston Gordon and July Westhale

In poet JULY WESTHALE’s upcoming book, moon moon, humanity finds itself in a precarious position—Earth has become unlivable, forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere. But when the moon proves overcrowded, humanity pushes even further, settling on the mysterious and perhaps astronomically dubious moon’s moon. Part modern epic, part ecological elegy, the collection tackles eco-grief, climate change, and human hubris, all while weaving humor throughout its poetic narrative.

July Westhale, whose earlier books include the autobiographical exploration of class warfare in California, Trailer Trash, and the intense poetic meditation on desire and divinity, Via Negativa (praised as “stunning” by Publishers Weekly), brings their signature incisiveness and wit to this timely new work. They also released the recent Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana, a delicious translation of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Today, Westhale converses with poet BOSTON GORDON, author of Glory Holes and the forthcoming Loose Bricks. Gordon, who also champions queer and trans voices through Philadelphia’s acclaimed “You Can’t Kill A Poet” reading series, guides this thoughtful discussion as they delve into meditations on writing, the moon, and what poetry teaches us about ourselves. 

You can pre-order moon moon here

The Moon as a Beacon of Human Earnestness: A Conversation Between Boston Gordon and July Westhale
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Raffia Memory

By LILY LLOYD BURKHALTER

The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.  

Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.  

Raffia Memory
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The Elephant’s Child

By PRIA ANAND

The elephant-headed boy was born with the head of a boy.

“I had been expecting you for years,” his mother told him. “By the time you were born, you could practically walk.”

The Elephant’s Child
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Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place 

By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

Amman is not incidental. The sayl, the stream that patiently carved a path between seven hills for thousands of years, drew—as waterways often do—the din of life. It was somewhere close to here that the Ain Ghazal statues were found. Nine thousand years old, captivating in their simplicity, they seem to be about to speak as you contemplate their black-tar eyes, the details of their fine features, their square torsos and solid limbs. 

 

Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place 
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