“I never imagined I’d write about boys,” Orenstein writes in her new book Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. Her previous work, Girls & Sex, focused on modern sex and relationships for high school and college-aged young women. Despite this, three years after that book—now against a background of #MeToo, President Donald Trump, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—Orenstein has shed light on the other side of the story. Through a combination of extensive interviews with young men and sociological research, the book seeks to move beyond the space of think pieces written by men and actually include them in the conversation. It gives readers a digestible overview of the problem.

Dear Chanel,

You write that your memoir Know My Name is “an attempt to transform the hurt inside myself, to confront a past, and find a way to live with and incorporate these memories.” This attempt reveals a myriad of fractures in the American judicial system. It also illuminates the reality of rape culture and chronicles your convalescence following a sexual assault by Stanford student Brock Turner that made headlines. I see this book as a reclamation of what the judge and the defense attempted to shut down: your voice. You offer guidance, critique, and analysis but through it all, you weave stunning descriptions, such as those of your home where you “watch the sun spill its yolk over the hills” and “smell the sun baking fallen shards of eucalyptus bark.”

As Ada Calhoun enters her forties, she suddenly finds herself staring at her son’s pet turtle, wondering if it wants something more from life. It sounds silly, but she realizes almost all of her female peers can relate. In Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Calhoun investigates why middle class Generation X American women (defined as those born between 1965 and 1980) are on the verge of “blowing it all up” in a different way from previous generations, haunted by what they did wrong and the versions of themselves that could have been. She writes, “How could women who wanted the challenging job and the financial independence, plus the full home life, still relate to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique?” or in other words, with all they have now, what is still missing?

Perumal Murugan grew up in a family of farmers in Tamil Nadu. He is one of India’s most well-known literary writers, having produced ten novels and five collections each of short stories and poetry. Several of his novels have been translated into English, including Seasons of Palm and Current Show. His best-known novel in the west, One Part Woman, was longlisted for the inaugural National Book Award for Translation. It won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman for writing in Indian languages and the Translation Prize from Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.

Towards the end of her new book Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante reflects on the importance of storytelling: “An individual talent acts like a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition.” This statement could be applied to the work as a whole, a collection of weekly columns the author wrote for The Guardian from January 2018 to January 2019 in response to questions provided by the newspaper’s editors.

In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities?

Jenny Slate is overwhelmed, and very sweet. Her book Little Weirds came out this month shortly after her Netflix special, “Stage Fright,” and an engagement announcement. Little Weirds is made up of micro-essays, sketches and fairy-sized windows into Slate’s mind. The collection hovers around a time in Slate’s life when being alive became joyless, painful and lonely in the worst way. At times, the book flits about too much, jumping into the surreal without warning. It’s disorienting. But when Slate hits a truth, which she does again and again, her perspective asserts itself with a gentle, earnest: Here I am!

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian author of international acclaim who came to the world’s attention with the publication of his first novel, The Circle of Reason. The book was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Médicis étranger. He went on to author the Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies, a novel short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Ghosh’s work is known for exploring the themes of love, loss, communal violence, tradition and memory. His novels are predominantly historical, and typically populated with characters whose stories stretch across geographical boundaries and span the world, yet his home town of Calcutta and the influence of Bengali culture are never obscured. Ghosh’s background as a historian and an anthropologist is evident in his writing and in the meticulous research that precedes every novel, yet his mastery lies in being able to capture the human condition through epic periods in history.

For nearly 50 years, Lydia Davis has been producing short stories, novels, translations, and essays that try to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. She is considered the master of flash fiction, and some of her stories need only two sentences to leave a lasting mark. Her preoccupation with brevity, she says in her new book, Essays One, stems from her experiences writing poetry as an adolescent. But, at some point growing up, Davis realized that being a poet would not be a suitable profession for her. She didn’t want to be a novelist either, so she adopted short fiction as a way of channeling poetic energy. In Essays One, Davis’s talents as a writer of both poetic and prosodic tendencies are on full display.

From the time we are young, we ask questions about the stories we are told. We want to know, sometimes even demand to know: Is this a true story? What really happened? And if presented with the ambiguous “based on a true story” explanation, we might find ourselves asking: Then which parts of it were real? But are these earnest questions foundational to the way we conceptualize stories, or is this impulse a pesky side effect of the way we are taught to think and categorize narratives?

Last month, the Booker Prize committee raised literary eyebrows when they awarded the coveted international prize to two authors for the first time since 1992, when they made a rule never to do so again. I suppose rules are meant to be broken. You would certainly believe this if you were one of the two winners—Margaret Atwood with her highly anticipated The Handmaid’s Tale’s sequel The Testaments; and Bernardine Evaristo, who saw her lifetime sales double after the recognition of a novel about womxn, her eighth, Girl, Woman, Other. Its publication may mark the first time many Americans are reading the Anglo-Nigerian author.

Jaquira Diaz’s debut memoir Ordinary Girls is an intimate portrait of her life, from her beginnings in El Caserio, a government housing project of Puerto Rico, to her family’s migration to the streets of Miami. In four distinct sections, she provides visceral accounts of personal battles with identity, depression, and violence. But as much as the memoir is about Diaz, it is equally a story about her family—a schizophrenic mother, a drug dealer father, and a racist grandmother, who, Diaz writes, “was the first person to ever call me a nigger”—and an island marred by the legacy of colonialism. Moving swiftly from essay to essay, section to section, the stories that constitute Diaz’s real life read with the pulse of short fiction—each word, sentence, and scene is vital and vibrant, meticulous in its structure and devastating in its poignancy.

The Columbia Journal launches its new podcast as co-hosts Emma Ginader (Online Poetry Editor) and Shalvi Shah (Online Fiction Editor) explore the writing processes of Fall Online competition judges Monica Sok (Poetry) and Akil Kumarasamy (Fiction). Podcast transcript available below.

When we grow up, where do we go? This is the question running through the heart of ​Find Me, Andre Aciman’s long-awaited sequel to his 2007 novel ​Call Me By Your Name​. Set decades after the ending of the first installment, we again find ourselves with Samuel, an illustrious but bumbling and lonely academic; Elio, Samuel’s son and a talented and dreamily idealistic pianist; and Oliver, the man with whom Elio had an affair, who has since developed his own brand of charismatic academic-cum-family man. What results is a story about time and how we watch it move endlessly forward and forward, while certain things stick with us and many memories don’t.

At multiple points in Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco says that the goal of her project — contacting the man who raped her after years of close friendship when they were both teenagers — is to “show what seemingly nice guys are capable of.” “Mark” (she gives the rapist a pseudonym) speaks with her openly about the assault which does, I suppose, seem like something a nice guy would do. His reflections on his own actions in their conversations reveal apparent remorse and indicate that the rape, 14 years in the past at that point, has had a major impact on his life. At the very least, he’s thoughtful about it. The text, however, does not actually function as the banality-of-evil accounting that her statement of intent promises. Instead, it’s an exploration of the messiness of confrontation and the possibility of forgiveness.

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.

Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites is a book about motive. Monroe notes that though men dominate the world of violent crime—most perpetrators and victims of violent crime are men, she writes, as are most detectives and investigators and criminal attorneys—women make up the bulk of true-crime consumers. Monroe wants to understand why so many women are obsessed with true crime but she is not content with explanations that rely on women’s presumed pragmatism (i.e., that women watch or read true crime in order to avoid becoming victims). Instead, she suspects women find real pleasure in these stories. She writes that “perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.” Note that first-person-plural. Monroe is writing from inside the obsession. She is someone who is prone to what she calls “crime funks,” someone who has always been “murder-minded.” I could include myself in that “we” as well. I’ve seen every episode of Law and Order: SVU, am incredibly susceptible to the inertia of an all-night Forensic Files marathon even as I recognize the familiar beats of these shows, the formless buzz of anxiety that hovers as I take in these stories of assault, murder, and violence. The book, then, sets out to be a personal interrogation as well as a cultural critique, and I suspect that, like me, many readers will come to the book with some first-hand investment in Monroe’s findings.

“Her performances have been enigmas to everyone so far,” says a character in Can Xue’s latest novel, Love in the New Millennium. She is talking about an opera singer, but her words sound just as apt as a descriptor for Can Xue’s experimental fiction: “Her songs aren’t about our past life, or about the emotional life of people today, but instead about the life we have never even imagined.” One of China’s most prominent novelists, Can Xue has called her work “literature of the soul.” Hers is a solo dance in the dark, a metaphysical picture of secular life that operates on its own elusive emotional logic. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation retains much of the zany humor from the Chinese while deftly easing readers into the meanings of names and idioms.