Ben, Author at Common Reader

Excellent Days

‘Perfect Days’ (2023), directed by Wim Wenders, challenges us, starting with its title, to consider what it means to live an enlightened, fulfilled life.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Solace of a Half-Empty Photo Album

By Ben Fulton

Somewhere between pages 25 and 30, showcasing my daughter’s fourth-grade photo and Christmas of 2015, the images cease, as if my photo album took a different route from my own at some mysterious fork in time. Somehwere between the physical world and the ether of the digital, years slipped away, as if they never took form.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

St. Louis under Eight Inches of Snow

By G. F. Fuller

As St. Louis is freezing, Los Angeles is burning. While a fake image of a burning Hollywood Sign circulates on social media, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office is trying to debunk a local hoax on Facebook that says there is a serial killer in Hillsboro. The killer, the post warns, “goes around knocking on peoples’ [sic] doors claiming to be homeless & he attacks you after you let him in. He's ruthless and very dangerous.” The sheriff says not to share the post; people do anyway.

Essays

The Thankful Poor by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Exercising the Prayer Muscle

By Jeannette Cooperman

Prayer attempts to control—or at least come to peace with—the uncontrollable. It is an aspiration but also an assent: you are believing in something, acknowledging something, hoping for something. You have given shape to what is amorphous and uncertain. Psychologically, prayer is a survival tactic.

Essays

Michigan Avenue, Chicago Loop, Christmas, by Victor Albert Grigas

To Save the Work of Photographer Victor Albert Grigas, His Son Gave It All Away

By John Griswold

Two years ago I wrote a short piece meant to be artful, so I went looking for an artful photo. I found it in an image by Wiki contributor Victor Albert Grigas.

Essays

The Journey of the Black Scholar as Ideological Terminator

By Gerald Early

What makes Late Admissions so fascinating to read, and such an important autobiography, is its self-awareness: it is actually a story about how embracing one’s self-destructive tendencies, one’s voracious selfishness and appetites, gives life meaning because, if nothing else, they make life interesting to oneself and they actually make you interesting to other people. It is a book about the ferocity of self-regard.

Reviews

Horror and the Misfits in the Heartland

By Cliff Froehlich

Blake Eckard’s films serve up an undiluted, deliriously potent drink. Not everyone will find it palatable. But if you are open to downing the cinematic equivalent of several shots of 190-proof Everclear, belly up to Intensely Independent’s bar and prepare for intoxication.

Reviews

Who Is Afraid of the Bible?

By Ben Fulton

Through centuries of existence, in a multitude of translations, and in myriad versions and bindings, the Bible has never mustered victory in any battle besides sheer force of influence. Even then, and up against all the glories and benefits its believers promise, it still finds plenty of ways to fall short. Put both of those qualities together, and you get a book everyone should read, even in taxpayer-funded public schools.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

My Friend Chooses How and When to Die

By Jeannette Cooperman

Hope changes form as we age. We are no longer hoping for new things or adventures or lovers or careers. We are not “living for” any particular cause or project. We are simply living. Hope is now a compact with the universe: a resolve to keep trying, keep giving, keep reaching out. So when the world tells us it would rather we die already, that we are about to become a great deal of bother, why would we not bow out gracefully?

Uncategorized | Essays

How to Get Along in the Universe

By John Griswold

How this volume of six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry landed in a town library in St. Louis’ Metro East is a mystery, but it has met its goal.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches