Columbia University hosted a virtual lecture by artist Sawako Nakayasu, followed by a conversation between Nakayasu, Susan Bernofsky (Director of LTAC at Columbia), and Lynn Xu (Writing Assistant Professor).
Review: Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed
Sneed offers us a glimpse into the 1980s to the world we live in now, traveling through time to a place where Black and Brown LGBTQ+ youth were growing up dealing with the AIDS crisis, police brutality, and struggling to…
Review: How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by Sue William Silverman
Poring over an old atlas, Silverman can trace the places and episodes of her difficult past to map the urgency and central drive of the book: what explains the narrator’s life-long fear and obsession with death, and what does it…
Review: The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed
In this collection, Reed accepts and moves deftly through anger, cultural truths, contemporary references, and never turns away.
Not Your Typical Gap Year: An Interview With Pam Mandel
Rachel Rueckert, nonfiction MFA candidate, spoke to travel writer Pam Mandel about her career path and recently released book, The Same River Twice: A Memoir of Dirtbag Backpackers, Bomb Shelters, and Bad Travel, a coming-of-age story about an unconventional, emotionally…
Review: Luster by Raven Leilani
This is Leilani at her funniest, and Edie at her most, well, relatable.
On Intersectional Character Dynamics & Subverting their Tropes: An Interview with Jenny Bhatt
Shalvi J Shah, an MFA candidate in Fiction and Literary Translation and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, talks to author Jenny Bhatt about craft, cultural stereotypes, her debut short story collection Each of Us Killers, and how far artists go…
Review: Girlhood by Melissa Febos
With psychological clarity and emotional precision, Febos revisits the past to rewrite the future.
Between Screens: Structural Revision
I write during screen time, the bounds of which creep earlier and earlier. But I don’t know how to structurally revise a 77,000 word novel in 20-minute increments.
Review: The Lightness by Emily Temple
The book tackles a myriad of themes. It moves seamlessly between spirituality and sexuality, from religion to relationships, and from Siddhartha’s Buddhism to Sleeping Beauty. It combines fact with fiction, folklore with fairytale, and desire with danger.
Review: Life of the Party by Tea Hacic-Vlahovic
An elaborate disappearing act, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic’s novel plots a young woman’s debaucherous romp through Milan’s high society as she acclimates her existing problems to a new milieu saturated by the fashion world and its attendant vices.
Eco-Horror, Motherhood, and the Creative Process: An Interview With Diane Cook
Leyton Cassidy, Podcast Editor for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Diane Cook to discuss her debut novel, The New Wilderness, as well as her writing process, relationship with nature, and the religion of writing.