2026 | The Common

Rocket City Rising

May 20, 2026 Dispatches

Huntsville, Alabama

The news came on a Tuesday: U.S. Space Command was moving to Huntsville. The headlines said Redstone Arsenal wins the bid, but that word wins sat strange in my mouth. In the breakroom, someone printed the article and pinned it to the bulletin board above the coffee pot. The photo showed the gates of Redstone shining in the morning sun, a soldier standing guard beside the sign.

Outside my office window, trucks rumbled past loaded with pallets of equipment. The air always smelled faintly of dust and jet fuel. I thought about how this patch of land in northern Alabama, once a cotton field, then a proving ground, then a missile test site, was about to become home to something even bigger.

The Sound the Sun Makes

May 19, 2026 Fiction

By ELIZABETH BRUS

The village sits in the throat of the Maloti mountains, which hum pink with the setting sun. From east to west, the mountains resemble many fists, the knuckles as peaks, the fingers as slopes, the space between a deep emerald.

Tsepiso—fifteen, lover of algebraic maths, The Bold and the Beautiful, and the Greek-American singer Yanni—must walk to the village pump and return home before dark. Thabang, her neighbor, who saves sweets for her from the Chinese shop, intends to marry Tsepiso. This news drifted through the village like a Sunlight soap bubble, and so Tsepiso’s mother has warned her to be home early. Otherwise, Thabang will take her into the maize fields, lay her down, and make her a wife.

Conjuring Home: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri interviews Samina Najmi

May 11, 2026 Interviews

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (left) and Samina Najmi (right)

SAMINA NAJMI and TALIA LAKSHMI KOLLURI first met in 2022 after Najmi read Kolluri’s short story collection What We Fed to the Manticore and conducted her own interview for The Normal School. In that conversation, they found that not only are they practically neighbors, but they share a tremendous amount of common ground. Thus, a friendship was born. This conversation unfolded over email during Najmi’s book tour for her electric memoir-in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, which spans her childhood in Pakistan and England, her first foray into the US in Boston, her family and professorial life, and Fresno, the place she now calls home. In this conversation, Kolluri and Najmi explore memory, return, the meaning of home, and the way we tell our stories.

Podcast: A. J. Bermudez on “The Sixteenth Brother”

May 8, 2026 Audio, Issue 30 Fiction, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: A. J. Bermudez

A. J. BERMUDEZ speaks to EMILY EVERETT about her story “The Sixteenth Brother,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. With a fable-like feel, the story explores the dynamics of family and gender roles in Morocco, as fifteen brothers scheme to convince their youngest sibling to allow the sale of the family’s ancient and opulent riyad. A. J. discusses the story’s framing device—a storyteller relaying it, almost like gossip—and how it creates both intimacy and distance. She also talks about her work in film, and the interplay between writing for the page and for the screen.

How to Cry in Public Places

May 7, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By EMILIA DŁUŻEWSKA

Translated from the Polish by KLAUDIA CIERLUK

Translator’s Note

I first encountered Emilia Dłużewska’s How to Cry in Public Places (Jak płakać w miejscach publicznych) three years ago, when it was shortlisted for the Joseph Conrad award—the most important Polish prize for a debut work. I was immediately captivated by its strong and unique voice: if you’re looking for a somber work about depression, this is not what you’ll find here. Instead, Dłużewska navigates her experiences with mental illness, the structural inequalities that fuel it, and the grey reality of post-Soviet Poland with unusual grace and humor, smoothly moving between disparate tones and registers. Playful vignettes, to-do lists, and shrewd word plays are just a few of the elements that comprise this genre-defying work. Set in contemporary Warsaw, with the lingering shadows of the Soviet era still shaping everyday life, How to Cry in Public Places nevertheless attests to the universality of the experience of depression, exploring how private suffering is deeply connected to the social and political contexts that surround it. The book’s intelligent deconstruction of mental illness affixes it to the vibrant vein of modern, English-language classics that approach similar issues through an equally dark and funny perspective, such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Juliet Escoria’s Juliet the Maniac—the key reason in my belief that Dłużewska’s prose will appeal to readers on the other side of the ocean as well.

Before Times

May 6, 2026 Dispatches

By JENNIFER CHRISTGAU AQUINO

Seattle, Washington

We walk sixteen thousand steps in shopping bags and Patagonia rain jackets through the never-rain, using Google maps to navigate your hometown. I talk incessantly about my lost life while you take us down wrong turns, saying, You will get there. At a paper maps store, we pull out drawers of flattened Earth. Of streets in Seville and Oslo, as if life can be laid out and easily navigated. More than once I say, Wouldn’t it be nice to travel there.

Working In

April 24, 2026 Fiction, Issue 31, Issue 31 Fiction

By ANDREW STEINER

The first time I saw Lake I was sitting on the bench between sets, waiting for the burn in my chest to subside. She walked past me to the big cage and slung her duffel to the floor. I watched with idle interest as she wrapped her wrists with soft black straps and wrangled her hair into a high loop. Her rose-colored Alphaletes came up well above her hips, and she wore a long-sleeved crop top that announced in block letters

NO TIME FOR RATS.

NO TIME FOR SNAKES.