The Common Issue 31 includes essays about a friendship in Senegal and an injury that won’t heal; stories set in Turkey and India, and in a laboratory, a racetrack, a gym, and a farm; and poems on family, race, faith, Ukraine, and more by Fatimah Asghar, Olena Jennings, Ezza Ahemed, Lauren Delapenha, Aleksandar Hemon, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and more. Visit The Common website for unique online content in addition to the print issue, such as “Conjuring Home: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri interviews Samina Najmi,” the podcast: A. J. Bermudez on “The Sixteenth Brother,” and the mesmerizing photo essay “On the Farm” by Nina Fuller.

TEACHERS! The Common website offers the section, “Teach The Common” with information about how to obtain classroom copies – with staff available to help select the best issues for the curriculum – and schedule a class visit with Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

The Common Issue 30 opens with Editor Jennifer Acker’s celebration of The Common’s 15th Anniversary and closes with an interview with Teju Cole, “The Epiphany in the Ordinary.” There is also a special portfolio of art and poetry from Ukraine; short stories from Morocco, Canada, Maine, Phoenix, and Cape Cod; essays about the body and a ruined city in the Argentine Pampas; and poems on art, dance, family, waiting, and loss from Wyatt Townley, Robert Cording, Lawrence Joseph, Anna Maria Hong, and more.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

This newest issue of The Common features a special portfolio highlighting photography and translated prose from Amman, Jordan; short stories from Hawai‘i, Kenya, Baton Rouge, and an Austin boxing gym; an essay on ritual and clothmaking in Cameroon; and poems by Erica Dawson, Rick Barot, Mary Jo Salter, John Kinsella, Julia Kolchinsky, and more. The Common is available for purchase in print as well as in Kindle, PDF, or e-book format.

TEACHERS: see Teach the Common. The editors will help with selecting the best issues for your curriculum, scheduling a classroom visit with Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker who answers students’ questions and provides a look into the publishing process, and providing resources, like sample lesson plans, complementary readings, audio, and interviews tailored to your chosen issues to enhance student engagement.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Ahead of their 15th anniversary next year, the Amherst College-based, Whiting Award-winning literary magazine The Common presents Issue 28, featuring a portfolio of contemporary writing by Catalan women in translation. Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker says, “So few books published in the US are translations, only about 3%, with works from German, French, and Spanish making up a full 45% of that. We wanted to showcase vibrant stories and poems from a tradition that our readers might be wholly unfamiliar with. These Catalan authors are award-winning, established women, but some have never before been published in English.” This issue marks a continuation of the magazine’s commitment to publishing translated works for English-language readers.

Each spring for the past eight years, The Common has published an Arabic fiction portfolio in translation. The spring 2025 issue will feature work from Amman, Jordan. Beyond the portfolio, Issue 28 contains writing from Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol, among others.

Amherst’s Whiting Award-winning magazine, The Common joins the arrival of flowers and birds with its new issue (27). For the past eight years, the magazine, whose mission is to deepen our individual and collective sense of place, has published a portfolio of fiction translated from Arabic, transporting English-language readers to places from Morocco to Palestine. This year’s fiction comes from Chad, South Sudan, and Eritrea, and it explores non-linear time, the resilience and failure of love, and the corrosive effects of political instability. Also featured is a new story from Chlorine author Jade Song, an essay from ANGI co-editor Sven Birkerts, and three Hawaiian Pidgin poems excerpted from a forthcoming Kaya Press anthology.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Two-time Lambda Literary fellow and co-editor of The Common‘s Issue 26 Miguel M. Morales offers these words to consider as we head into a season of feasting and celebration: “our farmworking hands helped harvest the feast.” The Common is a Whiting Award-winning literary magazine based out of Amherst College, and their latest issue features a portfolio of work from Latinx farmworkers, exploring issues of labor, immigration, identity, and “the farming culture that once coursed through the valley where Amherst is now located,” as David Applefield fellow Sam Spratford writes in the magazine’s opening essay. Issue 26 also features a new translated story from O. Henry Prize-winner Amar Mitra, a haunting essay about coming of age in 1990s Yugoslavia, and a poem from Whiting Award-winner Rickey Laurentiis, “Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking).”

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Issue 25 of The Common features a special portfolio of Arabic fiction from Kuwait, stories set in the USSR during perestroika and on the Texas-Mexico border, essays about romance during Ramadan, and the legacy of artist Marcel Duchamp, and poems by Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Karen Chase, Robert Cording, Tina Cane, and Felice Bell. The Common is an award-winning print and online literary magazine publishing literature and images with a strong sense of place, inspired by the mission of the town common—a gathering place for the display and exchange of ideas.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

The Common‘s mission has always been to deepen our individual and collective sense of place. This fall, Issue 24 of the magazine gives readers the chance to explore the creative possibilities of disaster, ponder the responsibility of telling others’ stories, and reflect on the power dynamics that arise along racial, religious, and regional lines. Contributors to this most recent issue include Fiction by Sindya Bhanoo, Ahmed Naji, Kathleen Heil, Gerardo Sámano Córdova Logan Lane, Gabriel Carle, Rossella Milone; Essays by Alexis M. Wright, Robin Lee Carlson Alexandra Teague, Meera Nair; Poetry by Tommye Blount, Joseph O. Legaspi, Akwe Amosu, Austin Segrest, Hussain Ahmed, Anacaona Rocio Milagro, Sara Munjack, Tom Paine, Elizabeth Metzger, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Darius Simpson, David Mills, Robert Fanning, Terri Witek, Daniel Tobin, Matt Donovan.