"Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Peter Trachtenberg

"Modern Gods" by John Freeman

The beloved author of At the Bottom of the River reads from and discusses See Now Then, her first novel in 10 years.

Wed, Mar 6, 2013, 6:30pm
Peter Jay Sharp Building, BAMcafé

Moderated by Phillip Lopate

“Kincaid writes with passion and conviction…a musical sense of language, a poet’s understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur.” —The New York Times

Born in Antigua, Jamaica Kincaid is the author of the memoir My Brother, which won the Prix Femina Etranger, and the works Annie John, Lucy, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, Mr. Potter, and The Autobiography of My Mother, which won the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Kincaid’s short story collection At the Bottom of the River won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, where she was a staff writer for 19 years.

www.nationalbook.org

Jamaica Kincaid and Phillip Lopate

EXPLICIT: LANGUAGE

Wed, Apr 3, 2013, 6:30pm
Moderated by Deborah Treisman

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao reads from and discusses his critically acclaimed new collection of stories, This is How You Lose Her.

“His world explodes off the page into the canon of our literature and our hearts.” —Walter Mosley

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic. He is the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; This is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist; and the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, and numerous Best American Short Stories anthologies. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a PEN/O. Henry Award, among other accolades. Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

www.nationalbook.org

Junot Díaz and Deborah Treisman, [explicit] 2013 Eat, Drink & Be Literary

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.

Used for decades to describe the tangible local environments and rootedness in works by authors like Faulkner, Frost, and Welty, the idea of a sense of place has fallen out of fashion. Some may think the notion of place outdated or unimportant given our globally mobile populations and technology-driven careers. But these characteristics mean that sense of place is more important now than ever. In our hectic and sometimes alienating world, themes of place provoke us to reflect on our situations and both comfort and fascinate us. Sense of place is not provincial nor old fashioned. It is a characteristic of great literature from all ages around the world. It is, simply, the feeling of being transported, of “being there.” The Common aims to renew and reenergize our literary and artistic sense of place.

The Common is published in print biannually from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Ours is a small community with far-reaching ideas. We’re a place of farmers, professors, immigrants, liberals, conservatives, dairy cows, tobacco plants, strip malls, and Victorian and Brutalist architecture. We have a rich literary history and support a vibrant diversity of artists and authors. The Common fosters regional creative spirit while stitching together a national and international community through publishing literature and art from around the world, bringing readers into a common space.

"Modern Gods" by John Freeman

The Common Magazine

Related tracks