Since 2001 The Common Review has published essays about the books and ideas that matter. Whether the topic is women and Islam or the pleasures of Proust, we are committed to tough, street-smart prose that will challenge, amuse, and sometimes offend—all in the service of building the most thoughtful community of readers in America today. Scroll down to view selected articles from the Summer 2008 issue of the magazine. Better yet, subscribe today ($17.95 for four issues) or pick up a copy of The Common Review at your local bookstore.
NEWS ITEM: Check out "Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the Paperback Revolution," by Bill Savage, on the Academy of American Poets website, Poets.org. You can read this fine article, which appears originally in the Summer 2008 issue of The Common Review, as well as explore Ginsberg's "Howl" and other Beat Generation poems at Poets.org.
From the Editor
“If you can fake authenticity,” an old friend used to say, “you’ve got it made.” Never has that maxim made more sense than at the present time. The reading public’s insatiable appetite for memoir shows no signs of abating—no matter how lurid, ridiculous, or just plain confected the story may be. Even more remarkable, as Terry Caesar’s Bookends piece in this issue reminds us, it’s no longer merely the human experience that attracts such attention: Now, in the posthuman quest for higher wisdom, we must grapple with the dog’s life as well. Read this article
Feature Articles
Can you think of a contemporary major filmmaker who is devoted to the great books? In this age of blood and sex in Hollywood productions, whimsical independent films about dysfunctional families, coming-of-age movies, or cartoons of happy animals saving the polar ice caps, it is difficult to select serious intellectuals from the central casting roster of glib, lowbrow directors. But to find a director consistently interested in the great books and the Western philosophical tradition—and willing to make them the very stuff of his movies—takes some searching. So it might strike one as strange to think of that search ending at the East Side condominium of Allan Konigsberg—or, as you might know him, Woody Allen. Read this article
Reviews
The year 2008, the centennial year of Richard Wright’s birth in Mississippi, brings the publication of a new novel, left unfinished at the time of his death in Paris. A Father’s Law is an existential novel; a psychological detective novel; a policier (as the French call police stories) in which the cop and his suspect are linked by chains of blood. If you believe you already “know” Richard Wright, if you’re exclusively familiar with the texts Native Son and Black Boy—books that established Wright as this country’s first major black literary artist, an artist born into poverty, yet smart and lucky enough to escape the Jim Crow South and pen books that struck a blow against American racial oppression—then you may find yourself perplexed by the topsy-turvy world of A Father’s Law. Read this review
Whenever I took Max Apple’s new story collection on the El, I found myself hunching over the book or shielding the cover with my bag, to prevent anyone from seeing the title. Maybe I was overreacting, but I didn’t want to give unintentional offense and end up trying to explain to an angry fellow commuter why I was reading something called The Jew of Home Depot. Yet the provocative title, with its echo of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, is perfect for the collection. Anyone wishing to understand today’s United States in general and the southwestern portions of it in particular will learn more from The Jew of Home Depot than from any sociology course, television show, editorial-page rant, or blog. Read this review