In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Leslie Jamison about her new book of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, the slow burn of revision, and how she writes her lyric endings. Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His other works include Map of the Invisible World, We, the Survivors, and Five Star Billionaire, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. He is the author of a memoir of an immigrant family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and was a research fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Rachel Lyon has done something many aspire to do: Made a career for herself as both a successful author and editor. Her debut novel, Self-Portrait With Boy, met with critical success, and is currently being developed as a feature film. Meanwhile, Lyon is the Editor-in-Chief at literary journal Epiphany. As part of our Ask the Editor series, Lyon spoke with MFA non-fiction candidate Elena Sheppard about her career path, what it really means to be an Editor-in-Chief, and what everyone who aspires to this kind of role really needs in their arsenal.

In Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s first collection of nonfiction writing, she has not reinvented the essay as she innovated the novel in her Outline trilogy—what she has done instead is showcase the pleasurable continuity of a mind at work on the same questions over time. We learn that she is less interested in writing about the self than in the often conflicting roles a self can inhabit—writer, mother, wife, daughter, in her case, or passive listener, teacher, and panelist in the case of Faye, the trilogy’s narrator. She

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care is a chronicle of the cancer Anne Boyer was diagnosed with right after her forty-first birthday. Woven throughout the deeply personal story of her battle with breast cancer—the physical body breaking down in ways that rebel against what society tells us breast cancer should look like—is a social and political critique of the breast cancer “industry.” She calls into question the language we use to describe illness: “A body in mysterious agony exposes itself to medicine hoping to meet a vocabulary with which to speak of suffering in return. If that suffering does not meet sufficient language, those who endure the suffering must come together to invent it.” And more broadly, she persistently scrutinizes the industry that gives us walks for a cure, doctors who decide courses of treatment, companies that create language for the side effects of chemotherapy.

The engulfing panic of losing someone indispensable to you stops time. Needs and emotions are put on hold: hunger, sleep, lust, and ambition are stifled by mourning. From this numbness, how do you kickstart your life? How do you begin to make sense out of death and absence? In Naja Marie Aidt’s new book When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back, Carl’s Book, the author gives us a survival manual. After her twenty-five-year-old son dies unexpectedly, her life is so profoundly affected that even language is obliterated.

Hello and welcome to the new Blurbed. Each month, Columns Editor Adin Dobkin gives recommendations from his reading list, as well as listening to Columbia Journal editors’ thoughts on reading, writing, or whatever happens to be on their minds.

Translator’s Note: The last protest Luis Montenegro attended in Nicaragua was on Mother’s Day in 2018. Pro-government groups fired on demonstrators that Wednesday, killing 15 and injuring more than 200. Luis stood next to a few. Not as part of any student group—a symbolic backbone of the protests—but rather as a citizen of the country and as a practicing doctor. He decided then that he couldn’t continue risking his life; he would contribute to the still-beating movement in other ways.

Hello and welcome to the new (and possibly improved?) Blurbed. Each month, columns editor Adin Dobkin gives recommendations from his reading list, as well as listening to Columbia Journal editors’ thoughts on reading, writing, or whatever happens to be on their minds.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Mira T. Lee, whose gorgeous debut, Everything Here Is Beautiful, came out in paperback earlier this year, talks about the inspiration for her book, the process of writing her very first novel, and when she decided writing should be her career and not just her side-hustle.

On the night of January 17th, the Brooklyn Museum coupled a tour of Do Ho Suh’s installation The Perfect Home II with a literary salon on Go Home!, a collection of works by Asian American writers on the impossibility of “going home.” Suh’s translucent fabric apartment, hand-stitched with chalk pink manatee blue, and faint jade nylon, glowed beneath the dome ceiling of the museum. The installation is a hauntingly precise 1:1 replica of his former home on 348 West 22nd St. Suh, one of South Korea’s most famous contemporary artists, is internationally renowned for these immersive, life-size installations of fabric houses. One: Do Ho Suh is his second major exhibition in the East Coast, following Almost Home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum last summer.

As editor-in-chief of The Rumpus, Marisa Siegel manages one of the internet’s most original and exciting websites, a space that prioritizes bringing marginalized voices into the spotlight. To learn more about her career and her path, MFA nonfiction candidate Elena Sheppard spoke to Siegel about her MFA experience and the formative roles and work that led her to where she is today.

Canon Fodder is an ongoing series of essays where writers talk about the books they’ve held close relationships with in their lives and why those books deserve a second read by a broader literary audience. The first essay in the series looked at the young adult novel, Catherine, Called Birdy. The second discussed James Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy.

Canon Fodder is an ongoing series of essays where writers talk about the books they’ve held close relationships with in their lives and why those books deserve a second read by a broader literary audience. The first essay in the series looked at the young adult novel, Catherine, Called Birdy.

With the start of 2019 comes a bevy of new books to explore. And while the list is overwhelmingly endless, we’ve done a little of the homework for you and selected a few nonfiction books we can’t wait to get our hands on. From works by icons like Toni Morrison, to debuts from rising stars like Jia Tolentino, 2019 has a little something for every type of nonfiction reader. Here are 12 forthcoming releases that have our nonfiction loving hearts all aflutter.

Canon Fodder is an ongoing series of essays where writers talk about the books they’ve held close relationships with in their lives and why those books deserve a second read by a broader literary audience.

The world is rapt with chaos. Ascendant reactionary movements across the globe, largely motivated by overt racism and xenophobia, have disrupted the convenient narrative of uninterrupted social progress, melding the frustrations of a weakening, shrinking, and resentful middle class into anger and fear.

Reading Amparo Dávila’s stories is like accepting an invitation for tea at a haunted house. It starts out ordinary, mundane even, and before you know it, the key turns in the lock and you are trapped.

When I first picked up Sarah Smarsh’s book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, I expected to find a familiar story. Like Smarsh, I grew up in a rural farming community in America’s heartland. I knew the unceasing nature of work on a farm, though ours was just big enough to sustain my own family, and the weekly routine of clipping out coupons that determined which cereals you could buy at the grocery store that week.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Samantha Hunt talks about the “dead people’s things” that surround her writing desk, why writers should “revise forever,” and why she works on many projects at the same time.