New Books in Literature

Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, au

Today I spoke with Emily Dinova about her new novel The Antagonist (Bruce Scivally, 2024). Dinova, a psychoanalytic candidate working towards a license to practice psychoanalysis, wrote The Antagonist as a way of healing her own trauma. Written as a creative act of revenge, Dinova found herself in a fragmented state w

How do we become the persons we are? Cornelia Maude Spelman's Solace (Jackleg Press, 2024) seeks to answer that question. A portrait of the emotional legacies and psychological landscapes that shaped the author's life, Solace unfurls in a series of vignettes drawn from diaries and personal stories about her relationshi

Life is tough for people of color in the early twentieth century—not only in the Southern states, which have put Reconstruction firmly behind them in favor of Jim Crow laws. Even so, Lucille Love, known as the Little Girl with the Big Voice, dreams of making her name on Broadway and eventually moving to Paris, leaving

Megan Tennant speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Little Women,” which appears in The Common’s brand new fall issue. Megan talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores the complex dynamics between two sisters in a religious family in South Africa after one sister gets

Born and raised on Manhattan Island, Eric Drooker began to slap his art on the streets at night as a teenager. Since then, his drawings and posters have become a familiar sight in the global street art movement, and his paintings appear frequently on covers of the New Yorker. His first book, Flood, won the American Boo