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 to create.

Columbia Journal is excited to introduce our podcast with poet Joe Pan, publisher of Brooklyn Arts Press and the smallest press to ever win the National Book Awards. Hear the episode, which details a conversation between Columbia Journal’s Issue 58 editors Shalvi Shah and Emma Ginader. Find out what it means to be a good literary citizen, how longing and anguish can create space for civic or literary engagement, and the perils and joys of small press publishing in this riveting interview with one of the literary world’s visionaries.

How do you heal from the pain of growing up? This question, refracted through a feminist lens, lies at the heart of Melissa Febos’s essay collection, Girlhood. With psychological clarity and emotional precision, Febos revisits the past to rewrite the future.

On the first day of lockdown, I play a movie for the kids so I can move bedroom furniture: eight-drawer dresser, queen bed, desk, file cabinet, nightstand, lamps. My husband works upstairs, in the apartment of neighbors who have fled upstate.

I felt many things as I read The Lightness, which is probably why I’m typing out this review a mere six hours after putting down the book. Generally, I’d let a book marinate. I’d let my mind soak in the words, the narrative, and the pages. Normally, I’d emerge slowly from the world of fiction, reluctantly type out a review, and then return to a world that’s achingly real. But with this book, I have mixed feelings. Feelings that I may forget if I soak for too long. So I’m emerging from the pages and deep-diving into my brain here.

An elaborate disappearing act, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic’s novel Life of the Party (Clash Books) 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.

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. The New Wilderness takes place in the near future, where a group of people have elected to live in what remains of a protected wilderness area. The reader follows Bea and her daughter as they struggle to connect, thrive, and simply make it through to the next sunrise. Since its July release, The New Wilderness has already been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Cook is also the author of a collection of short stories, Man V. Nature, which has received worldly recognition.

Familiar facets of our modern existence—the kinds of things that trend on Twitter—loom large in Friends and Strangers, the fifth novel from J. Courtney Sullivan, out this summer from Knopf. It follows Elisabeth, a New York writer displaced in the suburbs with her husband and newborn son, and Sam, a college student Elisabeth hires as a babysitter. Swirling around them are such attractions as a student rally against unequal pay for university workers, tiffs and tussles within a popular mommy Facebook blog, a social influencer chasing bikini-brand deals, and a book idea decrying the loss of the American identity. It’s a novel that reminds you just how hyper-aware the world has become since, say, the early 2010s—the war between genders, races, classes—and yet never loses sight of its timeless keystone: the strength of the bonds built by women, between women. This, coupled with the trials of stale love, and a fair few lies and secrets, comes together in a story that, at the heart of its 400-something pages, chips away at the stunning intimacy we can sometimes share with strangers.

In The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, writer and journalist Jason Diamond, author of the memoir Searching for John Hughes, returns to the suburbs of his childhood and adolescence in an attempt to better understand their impact on American culture. From a distance of time and space, Diamond considers the suburb as both concept and place, an in-between defined in relation to the urban center—a place which, linguistically if not physically, lies “beneath” the city. Diamond’s gaze, astute and compelling, is critical not only of the object of its inquiry but also of itself—of the hesitant, intricate love we have for the places that shaped us.

If ever there were a season that needs a do-over, it’s summer 2020. The most expansive and languid of seasons has become stilted and bowed under the pandemic restrictions. There’s the enforced indoor time, the constant bad news, and the de rigueur doom scrolling to take in everything. Into this summer of our discontent comes poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book of essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. Here is everything that’s been missing: family, food, travel, immersion in nature, the abundance of the season, the time to slow down and savor. There’s so much to be dazzled by in the world, Nezhukumatathil reminds us. Pay attention.

Coy best describes Alisson Wood’s relationship with the reader in Being Lolita. Wood cunningly uses the reader’s knowledge so that, at decisive points, they either read with or against the grain of this text. In the preface, Wood narrates her and the teacher’s first kiss. When the teacher kisses the inside of Alisson’s ankle to quell the itch of a mosquito bite, Alisson hadn’t read the novel. At that point, Mr. Nick North, her English teacher, told Alison that the story of Humbert and Lolita is a love story. A reader’s reaction to her admission sets up their relationship with the rest of the memoir. If you know anything about Vladimir Nabokov, you know what Lolita is about.

Romalyn Ante’s debut poetry collection ‘Antiemetic for Homesickness’ illustrates that longing, desire, and need for home. In the poem ‘Memory’, Ante’s speaker uses Tagalog to demonstrate the undeniable claim in longing for a place that is now absent in one’s life. ‘Tahanan means Home, Tahan na means Don’t cry anymore’. Each poem in Romalyn Ante’s book helps navigate the journey in moving from one home and creating another. The poems teeter on the language of two different perspectives, one from birth, which was the Philippines, and one of bombardment that was the United Kingdom, where she now resides. The poems move between English and Tagalog, which speak to Ante’s experience, navigating her own culture and that of the culture she has to present in. There is the Westernized Gaze glaring at Ante, and these poems speak to that fight against assimilation and succumbing to it. Ante’s book also speaks to the people who are left behind in search of a better life. One only has their memories to keep their hope and drive alive to find better opportunities as an immigrant. In the poem, ‘Only Distance’, Ante’s speaker recalls a memory, “When all the stars are out, she returns/ to this tropical wind, to the constellation/ of moles on his shoulder, his second-hand clothes./ He slices mangoes, and lays them on a banana leaf./ She’s with him…”

I once heard there is a pool of loss and each loss adds to it. There’s no differentiating between its objects, especially when there’s no defining what’s been lost. But when it came to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, you knew exactly what was at stake, Grandpa: your family, friends, and country. Your life.

In the early months of the pandemic, an old meme resurfaced on social media: fake plane windows made from household objects – mug handles, washing machine doors, toilet seats – posed in front of a photo of the sky. It had started as a joke about being unable to afford international travel, and became one about being unable to leave the house. The caption: 2020 travel plans be like.

Those familiar with Lindsay Ellis likely came to know of her in the context of media criticism. Her snarky and infinitely meme-worthy video essays covering Disney and The Hobbit, among other topics, draw millions of views on YouTube and netted her a Hugo Award nomination in the process. But behind the scenes, Ellis has been brewing up Axiom’s End, a sci-fi thriller that grapples with timely questions about our civilization while its hero grapples with aliens.

It’s midnight and I’m still awake, writing by a halo of lamp light. I glance up at my bedroom window and the apartments across the street have vanished into the night. The city is asleep in the gloaming, and I am the last one awake. The world feels gone and lonely, so I go inside my tent.

“‘You tired, runner girl?’ They all call me runner girl,” confesses the narrator in the opening of Lynn Steger Strong’s second novel, Want. Having lived a former life as a competitive distance runner, this immediately brought me back to my college locker room, where we had a poster of Lauren Fleshman, runner-writer extraordinaire, standing on an empty track with her arms crossed. “Objectify me,” the poster read. “Look at me, study me, and understand me. Then, and only then, can you make my running shoes. Don’t give me small, pink versions of a man’s running shoes. I’m not a small, pink version of a man.” I looked at this poster every time I left the locker room.

To read Clerk of the Dead as a collection about death is to see these poems through a single lens that doesn’t take into account the many facets glimmering in the text. Death is merely a specter haunting the lines, much as Death’s specter haunts us, especially as COVID-19 continues to ravage the nation. Alan Perry’s poems do not only reckon with death or dying; they reckon with what it means to lose something.

There are few novels that can claw their way into my cold, easily distracted heart, but Pizza Girl waltzed right in. Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel is, in a word, artful. It is an entertaining exploration of a meandering mind and dives into the rich, layered internal life of someone who claims to not know themself. And it is truly worth your time.

Names are incantations, and mine is no exception.