"Why don’t they love? Why don’t they care? Those are not real people at my table, the child finally decides. Those are creepers." Phoebe Hyde examines what responsibilities we have to the people we read about or watch on screens in her new story, "Raspberries." Check it out below! buff.ly/FqWl80x

In "The Garden of the Gods," Eli Rodriguez Fielder takes a trip through the heart of the Midwest, navigating parenting, road trip mishaps, and the tension of being queer family in the current political climate. Read our latest dispatch now: buff.ly/JVaUlHF

"Loss upon loss settling / Under a lattice of ice." As winter draws closer, listen to Phillis Levin read his short-but-sweet "December Tanka" poem published in Issue 29. Now on our website!

"In his eyes I had become the unicorn he had so sought to produce: someone who had, in the most acceptable terms, separated himself from our family’s dysfunction" Jim Shepard's new poetic essay "The Acrobat" vaults between a love of literature and family history. Read now!

"It was easier for me to pretend you were just 'abroad,' as you often were, 'in Syria,' in some distant elsewhere, and not dying a few streets away" Aya Labnieh's "Damascene Dream" searches for a phone line with the dead. buff.ly/owzcJN4

"You say you just stumbled on my story like a tripwire? And you didn't mean to be here at all?" Phoebe Hyde's metafictional piece, "Raspberries," draws readers into an especially dark and intimate common: a kitchen, a yard, a basement in someone else's wartime. Check it out below!

"It’s easier now to see / deep into the woods" On our website, Phillis Levin's gentle "December Tanka" poem published in Issue 29 now features a recording by the author. Give it a listen, and let the chill of December wash over you in these hotter days.

Find The Common @ the Brooklyn Book Festival next Friday! Join us at Books Are Magic for a panel discussion / book signing with Emily Everett, Ananda Lima, Annell, López, & Olivia Wolfgang-Smith. 📍122 Montague Street, Brooklyn. 🕖 7PM This event is free and open to the public.

"Visitors passing through on the way to the living room might exclaim 'Who’s reading The History of Lycanthropy? Or All About Tornadoes?'" Jim Shepard's essay "The Acrobat" details a childhood with books, and a father's desire to reconnect. Read from our Reading Life series now!

"Everything would be colored by irreversibility from this moment on." During a journey to a waterfall, a man undergoes a rebirth of violence and clarity. Check out Daniela Alcívar Bellolio's short story, translated by Jack Rockwell.

“'Come, come, come,' and they’d fly, all three of them, out their cages in a flurry and land on your breasts, climb your gold chains, nestle against your cheeks." Aya Labnieh's dream-dispatch between Anaheim, CA, and Damscus, Syria, revisits the loss of an "Ur-Mother."

“As a child, I loved cartoons in which a character with no way out draws a door. We hit a wall and make a door. We both love hiding words inside words.” Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta are animated and sprawling in this recent interview, available to read now on The Common. buff.ly/iyNWi1H

September has arrived. Ring in the new month by reading this conversation between TC Contributors Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta as they unfurl the catalysts and contours that define their writing. buff.ly/iyNWi1H

"Most Saturdays, we embarked spontaneously, almost conspiratorially, in the bleary, quiet hours before Mom woke up." Luchik Belau-Lorberg's epistolary dispatch, "From IHOP," revisits the strange intimacies of dining in a liminal space.

"Not an act, not a consequence, but life." Against a violent backdrop of color, a man journeys to a waterfall in Daniela Alcívar Bellolio's short story, translated by Jack Rockwell. Read below! buff.ly/ZCcqQFk

"I’d shove the scrambled eggs around my plate. You’re like me: easily spooked, boyish, with an awkward smile. We did our best to tell each other something of our feelings." Luchik Belau-Lorberg's epistolary dispatch, "From IHOP," revisits the strange intimacies of dining in a liminal space.

“That’s the right question,” the beast said. “You’re nobody. The question is: Who am I?” Need something to listen to? Now on our website, you can hear Pria Anand read her masterful myth retelling "The Elephant's Child," a feature from our spring issue.

"Light snow, bare branches. / It’s easier now to see / Deep into the woods" In her poem, "December Tanka," Phillis Levin reveals how the arrival of winter has the possibility to heal and offer insight. Find it in Issue 29, or check it out below! buff.ly/KbwCijx

"The beauty of silence // scrubs clean all doubt, clears / away the brittle leaves / on sidewalks." Ever wonder what a poet's last poem sounds like, strolling along in the early morning? Look no further than "My Last Poem," Michael Catherwood's brilliant and gentle Issue 29 piece.

"My obsession with this cloth also was what made it so difficult to write this essay." In this month’s podcast, Lily Lloyd Burkhalter talks about how her time in Cameroon drove her Issue 29 essay. www.thecommononline.org/lily-lloyd-burkhalter-on-raffia-memory/

“everything you didn’t have time to take / was like a ransom paid / for an incredibly fortunate life“ Read poems from Anna Malihon’s forthcoming collection on love and nature, on becoming a refugee, translated from Ukrainian by Olena Jennings. www.thecommononline.org/august-2025-poetry-feature/

"After midnight, cottonwoods are inconsequential teeth, ripped from the ground by the Mississippi River." In our latest dispatch, Madeline Simms reimagines the New Madrid Earthquakes, writing towards a nonlinear relationship between us and our environments. www.thecommononline.org/dispatch-fro...

"His mother called something over her shoulder before she sank, and the boy thought it might have been 'keep watch,' but he couldn’t be sure." A new recording of Pria Anand's story "The Elephant's Child," published in our spring issue, is live! Listen to this myth retelling here:

"Umm al-Summaq has turned into a city bursting with meaningless things." In "Goats in Jabal Amman," trans. Mayada Ibrahim, Eslam Abu Haydar relives the softly dying past of a city at the crossroads. Read the full piece from issue 29 here! buff.ly/MX7Gjls

"Light snow, bare branches. / It’s easier now to see / Deep into the woods" See how Phillis Levin explores the relationship between time and clarity through the changing of the seasons in her poem, "December Tanka." Find it in Issue 29, or check it out below!

"Possession, intangible / though it passes through my hand, it stages / its shift in authenticity." In his poem "Kaymoor, West Virginia," G. C. Waldrep meditates on Kaymoor's historical landscape with precise clarity. Read it below!

"There is no pain: // wind and branches and blue / lakes." Walk down a cobblestone path with an old poem, bright along its edges, in Michael Catherwood's "My Last Poem," recently published in Issue 29.

Stop by Books are Magic Montague for a free panel conversation and Q&A with authors Emily Everett, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, Annell López (@annelllopez.bsky.social), and Ananda Lima (@anandalima.bsky.social) on September 19th as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival (@bkbookfest.bsky.social)! RSVP below!

"Ms. Friedlander stood in front of the classroom with a box cutter and methodically opened the cardboard printed with a row of schoolhouses on the side flaps. There was magic in that box." --Willie Perdomo, "You're Going to Hear the Pages Turn" Read more:

One day left for our fee-free submission week to broaden access! Until August 22nd, submit your work to The Common free of charge. We welcome and encourage all communities underrepresented in U.S. literary magazines and journals to participate! Read more below: buff.ly/rDQfZ0A

"whose is Severodonetsk? / no one’s anymore / a tank went from the bus station towards “Azot” / nobody knows whose" From our latest translation, a documentary poem which draws from IM comments made by Ukrainian civilians under Russian-occupation. www.thecommononline.org/talks-with-the-besieged

"Sin has consequences, repent, / a laughing jackalope, / Las Vegas, / where all is rendered garish and tolerable / under the heaving slick of capital." Moriel Rothman-Zecher moves through the religious and cultural landscape of America in a reflective poem. Check it out below!

"I openly embraced my weirdness to discover that that had long been the only thing that had ever had any hope of setting me apart." Read Jim Shepard's tender consideration of fatherhood, education, and reading in this new entry in "The Reading Life" series.

"The mystery is part of what makes poems powerful. They can say something you didn’t know you needed to hear—even if it’s something you don’t quite understand." In conversation with Megan Pinto, Lena Moses-Schmitt walks us through her spacious poetic process. Read now!

We are midway through our fee-free submission week to broaden access! Until August 22nd, submit your work to The Common free of charge. We welcome and encourage all communities underrepresented in U.S. literary magazines and journals to please participate! Read more below: buff.ly/sn2VYZr

"My own body, when buried, will leach / into the soil, run to the sea, poisoning it all" In her poem, "Ode to What Tethers Me," Meghan McClure explores the act of needing and the guilt associated with it. Find it in Issue 29, or check it out below! buff.ly/WOrp0uY

"During childhood I tried to catch the light that seeped in through the windows. When I closed my eyes, I saw creatures made of light, and I tried to catch them, but they vanished in an instant." In Eslam Abu Haydar's Amman Compendium essay, ruminants traverse a disappearing city:

"Politics make for easy art in struggling democracies, I said. Diamonds in the ashes." The camera is ‪@tsvoboda.bsky.social‬'s highway into Kenya, expression, and artistic community in her new fiction piece "Decapitated," published in Issue 29 and now on our website.

"We were prying choice from the jaws / of poverty" Check out this contemplative and historical poem, "Kaymoor, West Virginia" by G. C. Waldrep, published in Issue 29 this spring!

"Miss Abracadabra too deserves a prize" In Tom Ross's debut novel, Terese Svoboda finds an original style, immersive prose, and "the confidence of a memoir but with all the sumptuous details the novel requires." Check out her review of "Miss Abracadabra" below!

Attention writers! In an effort to remove barriers to access, The Common is now open for fee-free submissions until August 22nd. We encourage any and all communities underrepresented in U.S. literary magazines and journals to send us your writing! Read more below: buff.ly/rDQfZ0A

Join us for a free panel conversation and Q&A with amazing authors Emily Everett, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, Annell López (@annelllopez.bsky.social), and Ananda Lima (@anandalima.bsky.social) on September 19th as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival (@bkbookfest.bsky.social)! RSVP at the link below!

"Just like in Madrid, how women go out to peruse the latest styles, in the sleepy provincial capital they went out 'to see what Ríopardo has in that’s new.'" Check out Alani Hicks-Bartlett's new translation of a popular Hispanophone story about a shopkeeper's burning jealousy! buff.ly/mlqfIXF

"...writing is an extension of the magic found between the covers of a book." From Hooked on Phonics in grade school to an MFA program at forty years old, Willie Perdomo's "You're Going to Hear the Pages Turn," reflects on a life of reading "as a practice."

“I’m dull in this yellow room, dressing the table with / the plates I scraped yesterday.” Clara Chiu examines the domestic act of setting a table and the shades of interiority it contains. Read our latest dispatch below!

Attention writers! In an effort to remove barriers to access, The Common will open for fee-free submissions from August 15-22. We encourage any and all communities underrepresented in U.S. literary magazines and journals to send in your writing! Read more below: buff.ly/sn2VYZr

"This afternoon I am well, thank you. / Walking down Main Street in Danville, KY. / The heavy wind so sensuous." In a poem that wanders across America, Moriel Rothman-Zecher considers the religious, the cultural, and the everyday moments that shape the zeitgeist of the country.

"It no more occurred to me that I could become a writer than an astronaut or an angel, but it did occur to me that I could make up and write down all the stories I wanted." In our "Reading Life" series, Jim Shepard shows how reading shifted his relationship with his dad. Read now!

"It’s funny how sometimes those little notes or moments become the center of something. You don’t realize how important they are at the time." Lena Moses-Schmitt talks superpowers and the page's poetic gravity in her new interview with Megan Pinto. Read below!

"How many generations will live with my plastic / echoes scattered in the sand they run between their toes?" Meghan McClure's "Ode to What Tethers Me" weighs the cost of living with its environmental impact. Find it in Issue 29 or check it out below!