By Alex Wexelman

Roughly a decade after it became the predominant style in the art world, Minimalism—a pared down writing style influenced by the likes of Ernest Hemingway—became a popular trend in literature

By Maeve Barry

Stefan’s adopted mom told him I got into Showstoppers cause I’d have no problem wearing the skanky outfit. Stefan’s adopted mom told him this to make him feel better because he didn’t get in. He told me. I am eight and three quarters and I don't care.

By Alex Wexelman

The short story, like many of Friedman’s, concerns a working-class Jewish family and the intra-family struggles for success and financial freedom in America.

By Sergei Linkov

Sometimes, when my mother partook of vodka, she would become convinced that she was the illegitimate daughter of some nobleman. She spoke of his estate on the Neva river, where she recalled herself toddling along poplar-line alleys and hiding alder cones under the Roman columns of the gazebo.

By Victor Barall

Now there is a gradual dying away, a diminution by degrees of the small talk among the great ones as the rumor diffuses through the stadium that the sovereign has been seen stepping out of his chamber, or if not the sovereign, then at least the large white feather that invariably accompanies him on the days he dons, at a rakishly oft-kilter angle, his black velvet beret.

By Carlie Hoffman

It was October. An unseasonably warm day. I know because I was wearing shoes without socks. Near the campus of John F. Kennedy High School, the stray geese crowded on the brown grass by the traffic circle, like groupies as if the honking horns of the cars were a rock band.

Besides the fact that I happened to be living in one of them, all the houses looked exactly the same: blue clapboard and white vinyl trim stippled to look like real wood. Houses with landlines and hot tub hookups and no hot tubs attached. Horseshoe-shaped driveways, single acre lots. Idyllic little prefab Kennedy compounds. Pretty much the entire development had been deserted since Labor Day, which was when I’d arrived on the scene, still tan from the final summer of what I’d already begun to think of as my Old Life.

The only son Garry wanted wasn’t even a blood son. A reject, a castoff. Thomas, this non-son, had a forehead scooped into a kind of slight horn. Pinched-out lips. Laugh like a throttled chicken. But Garry knew from his years training airborne cadets that without him, the boy’s life was a coin flip: Thomas, a fatherless fuck-up, or Thomas, a true leader of men.

Today at work I walked in on Sarah in the work bathroom adjusting her outfit in the full-length mirror, she jumped when I opened the door. I found myself thinking […]

The woman, in order to have sex with her husband, had to write it all out after it happened. When they were young, before the kids, and they had sex […]

Cheyenne and I are in her bathroom applying our makeup under the drop lights her dad got for cheap. It’s her very own half bath with double sinks so we […]

It’s not even noon, but the sun’s way high, and Johnny’s on the jukebox. I’m sitting in the world’s shiniest diner, staring at the woman who has the most beautiful […]

My mother wants to sell me oils. The oils smell like fresh-cut flowers and citrus fruits and the fishbowl stench of a house that’s been left unoccupied for several months. […]

I had a job over the summer, not because of financial necessity but because my mother held an unshakable belief in the virtue of work. She said that I needed […]

It is within reach, what I need most; creative time alone. That is, no co-educational tits occupying the airspace above my shoulder as I labor to paint them, pink as […]

Here is a world, black and body, a mother who is protected and timeless, a father who is her husband and stays. a midwife with hands worth more than a […]

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2022 Spring Contest, which was judged by Garielle Lutz, Aaron Coleman, Colleen Kinder, and Natasha Rao. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our four wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

We found a body in the bathroom. It wasn’t wearing any underwear, it wasn’t wearing any clothing at all. The body was wet, face down; its arm was twisted, with the palm of its hand toward the ceiling. We could hear the shower running from the moment we entered the bedroom, or maybe even before that, from the moment we opened the apartment door using the key the building super kept on hand for emergencies. Maybe that body was in the habit of showering with the door open. Maybe it didn’t manage to close the door, or it wanted to leave the water running while walking around naked. Who knows. Here I could skip to the part where later in the hospital they told us that the body had high blood pressure, that it had suffered a heart attack, which could have been avoided if it had taken care of itself. But some memories surfaced between the bathroom and the hospital that I don’t want to gloss over.

To get the eel bait, we had to take an old rowboat out to a motorboat. I had never gone fishing before. I have been afraid of eels ever since, at the age of seven, I saw one in an airport fish tank and learned from the accompanying sign that their blood is poisonous to humans. Even the name of the fish disgusts me, the yowl the word entails, the scream of it.

The first twenty minutes of the match were niggly, with plenty of elbows in play. There would be purple bruises for the boys to poke at gingerly when they woke to their Sunday morning hangovers. But it wasn’t till Colum got shoved into a graceless tumble that aggression stole a yard on matters. He took a flat hand to the chest from their center forward, a ribbony ginger lad with no manners. Colum slowly two-stepped his way to a fall near the penalty spot. He stayed sitting there for a few beats too long, and I was walking over with my hand out to help him to his feet when I saw the look on his face. Did you ever see a baby who’s taken a bump or been annoyed in a way that’s fresh to them, when they can’t make up their small mind whether to wind up for a bawl or just laugh? The flickering mood on his face set me worrying. Colum’s a large lad and when he falls you’d want him to fall on the right side of the bed, otherwise no one’s having a nice morning. I took my hand away and moved it up to my hair, but he’d already seen it. […]