Commonspire
Editor’s Note: Commonspire My reach exceeded my grasp, but when I coined the title to this note in an essay on the Potomac Review website in October 2016, the neologism was meant to suggest a vision for the future that…
Cadence and Disclosure
Editor’s Note: Cadence and Disclosure by Albert Kapikian Like other literary journals, a literary journal that issues out of a community college issues out of a collaboration between the arts and the humanities, between, that is, writers and editors, those…
Woke: A Review of Alan Rossi’s Mountain Road, Late at Night
In Alan Rossi’s, Mountain Road, Late at Night, Nathaniel, from whose perspective the first quarter of the novel is told, has just lost his brother, Nicholas, who he remembers as having had “beautiful and ardent thoughts about life,” but who…
We Know Better
In Terminal, an installation I saw at the entrance of the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery, its creator, Subodh Gupta, had arranged a series of spires, the kinds of golden spires seen atop the temples, mosques, and churches of his native New…
Impeachment
Ukraine has a starring role in our news today, so it might seem beside the point to remember when it was not the subject of so much purported expertise, when its eastern cities were engulfed by a different sort of…
One Hundred Years of Self-Help: Two Book Reviews
As the title of Marian Crotty’s award-winning short story collection, What Counts as Love, suggests, what counts is not always the same as what’s hoped for, but may be exactly what’s expected, for in love’s pursuit, her characters go about…
Democracy Dies in Darkness: Two Book Reviews
The Eastern Shore by Ward Just The Great American Political Novel, from Henry Adam’s Democracy, to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, from Toni Morrison's Beloved, to Ward Just’s Echo House, tangles with the notion of America as an…
Don’t Be Evil: A Review of Blume Lempel’s “Oedipus in Brooklyn”
“Abandon Yiddish.” The masters of the Enlightenment might as well have said abandon hope, for all the impact this particular prescription for a better life would have on its intended beneficiaries. Never mind that Yiddish had been their language for…
Fled Is That Music
The Truman Commission, which determined that everyday Americans deserved access to the same kind of education offered at Harvard and Yale, the kind of education, that is, that exposed them to the resources that allowed them to "live free," free…