The Common: Issue #5

The Common #5

by Jennifer Acker (Editor), Terese Svoboda, Claire Messud

Finding the extraordinary in the common has long been the mission of literature. Inspired by this mission and the role of the town common, a public gathering place for the display and exchange of ideas, The Common seeks to recapture an old idea. The Common publishes fiction, essays, poetry, documentary vignettes, and images that embody particular times and places both real and imagined; from deserts to teeming ports; from Winnipeg to Beijing; from Earth to the Moon: literature and art powerful enough to reach from there to here. In short, we seek a modern sense of place.

Issue 05 was published in the Spring of 2013.

Original Fiction by Terese Svoboda, Lee Johnson, Virginia Reeves, Earle McCartney, Norman Lock, Amy Brill, and Anne Swärd

Poetry by Peggy O’Brien, Jon Thompson, Beryten Beytenbach, Ian Maclellan, Lawrence Raab, Jordana Rosenberg, Mo Fei, Yang Jian, Cat McLaughlin, David Lehman, Cralan Kelder, Giampiero Neri, Alexei Tsvetkov, Pablo Neruda, and Denise Duhamel

Essays by Claire Messud, Karen Latuchie, E.A. Farro, and Gregory Curtis

Images and Artwork by Kate McLean and William Hogarth with introductions by Amy Sande-Friedman

201 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 30, 2013

About the author

Jennifer Acker is founder and editor in chief of The Common. Her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, Guernica, The Yale Review, and Ploughshares, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and organizes LitFest. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband. The Limits of the World is her debut novel.