The Common Review ceased as a print publication with the Fall/Winter 2011 issue. However, we will be posting a series of ten new articles on this site over the next couple of months, at approximately 1-week intervals. We trust that you will find these articles interesting, provocative, and equal in quality to the high standards set by The Common Review during its ten-year run.
Not long ago I got a call from an undergraduate student eager to interview me at length about the 1960s. She had heard from a younger faculty member in another department that I was a “veteran” of the antiwar movement, a...[more]
In many of my classes at Illinois State University, I’ve been setting aside time to ask the following questions of my students: How many works by US Latino or Latina writers have you encountered in your classes so far? Who are...[more]
In awarding the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa in October, the Swedish Academy cited the Peruvian novelist’s “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance,...[more]
In early 2009 the Texas Board of Education met to vote on whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution must be taught in the classroom. On the surface, this seems reasonable: assessing the...[more]
“Besides reading, there was no place,” declares Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. For most of its history, Russia has been a place where books have seemed more real, carried more authority, than the “real” world. And, from Tsar...[more]
To understand Robert Coles’s two latest books, it helps to have seen his writing chair. Comfortable and unassuming, it sits with a blanket draped over it in the study of the three-story house in Concord, Massachusetts, where...[more]
In the memorable words of those other ‘60s hangovers, the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” There have been few stranger trips than the intellectual odyssey undertaken by some of the Dead’s contemporaries, as...[more]
Dubravka Ugrešić is the most prominent writer to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in recent times. Though she has written movingly, in novels and essays, about the wars that ripped apart that country and the painful healing...[more]
Gianni Vattimo’s book-length essay, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, first published in 2000 in Italian, is a kind of apologia for a philosophical life that has always been, to say the least, exposed to controversy....[more]
Fran Hawthorne opens The Overloaded Liberal with a concise definition of the emergence of what I’d call pocketbook activism: “harnessing everyday life to change something bigger in the world.” She contrasts this with the...[more]
Congratulations to the winners of our annual short story prize! And thanks to judge Gina Frangello for choosing our winners. Gina Frangello is the author of two critically acclaimed books of fiction, Slut Lullabies...[more]
The first prize winner in The Common Review's Short Story Prize, judged by Gina Frangello The Cherry Tree by Lowell Uda "The moon," said Oscar, "is made of these petals. We're going to make the moon fat again." He...[more]
With the Fall/Winter issue of The Common Review, after ten years, we will cease print publication and shift all our attention to developing a full-fledged online version of the magazine, to premiere in Fall, 2011. In the coming...[more]
A long trip gives us reason to complain. If only it—no. Set aside impatience. Resign yourself to writing on the train. [more]
In literary theory the mimetic fallacy is an error authors make when they depict a condition too literally. An example is the portrayal of cruelty in a way that is repulsive in the eyes of the audience or a portrayal of boredom...[more]
