Welcome to Blurbed, a round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed features a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), for which she won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017 and won the Whiting Award in 2018. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang. Here, she talks with MFA candidate Audrey Deng about cultural stigmas around mental illness, “narrative therapy,” and academia.

Territory of Light chronicles the year-long journey of a mother and her daughter navigating a newly disorienting world in the wake of her husband’s swift and painful exit from their lives. Throughout these closely linked twelve stories, the reader intimately observes the family’s crushing experiences of anger, resentment, detachment, and desolation, transforming their relationships and, inevitably, their lives.

“Can I see, Mama?” Gretchen tugged on her mother’s mini dress.

“In a minute,” she answered sharply, struggling with a piece of poster board. “I’m tryin’ to make the pinhole the right size.”

In this interview, MFA candidate Katie Shepherd talks to Valeria Luiselli about her new novel, Lost Children Archive.

Staring at these bones

in the utter rhythm of sun

they seem inevitable,

but only might have been.

It Is Too Late Now

Look at the map, the clock and the calendar.

It is too late!

Here is the crux of the matter!

This is the hour to go our separate ways.

I rode the train to Midway Airport, praying it was going to work this time. It hadn’t worked last time. Cindy was too timid, too needy. But when I saw my older sister laughing as she pulled her baby blue suitcase off the baggage belt, I was more optimistic. There was no sign of the beaten-down blonde I put on a bus 16 months ago. She looked taller and blonder, and when I told her that she said she loved my new Dutch cut.

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.

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her most recent book, the novel Heat and Light, won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Her previous books include FAITH; THE CONDITION; BAKER TOWERS; MRS. KIMBLE, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; and the short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

Put simply, the wanting was for one thing only:
to plant a seed. To bear fruit. Never mind
the world was ending. I closed my eyes

These translations of avant-garde Iranian modernist Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) have been co-translated from Farsi by Rebecca Ruth Gould and the Iranian poet Kayvan Tahmasebian and have been drawn from their forthcoming project, available here.

Gary Smalls never thought he’d work at a place like the Corporation. He was a recent college graduate in Future Studies, broke and sticky-fingered, with a plump, boisterous girlfriend named Molly who made love to him like heaven was on fire. And he wanted to marry her. He wanted to marry Molly and give her the obstreperous, round-faced, donut-inhaling children she dreamed of, but his degree in Future Studies was as meaningless as his first hand job as a teen—it was fun, even enlightening, but ultimately inconsequential, much like Gary was starting to feel himself.

I’m a little confused.
We were crowbar sweethearts—
remember the lengths we’d go for pomegranates?

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.

In college, I failed an anthropology assignment on thick description, the concept from which Dr. Cottom takes her title. I had tried to write descriptively and engagingly, like the writing major I was, though in her comments on my piece, the professor essentially told me I had forgotten to do the assignment. I wrote descriptively — almost creatively — but not anthropologically. I was missing the sociocultural lens she had asked us to apply; I had failed to see the patterns in the patrons behavior, how they served (and didn’t serve) as a microcosm of something bigger.

The collection New Selected Poems: Thom Gunn draws from the poet’s canon to commemorate one of the most profound members of a generation of English poets who came of age during and after World War II. An AIDS-era eulogist. A renegade Cambridge-cowboy. A devilish Brit writing from both the epicenter and the lava-outskirts of a shifting American landscape. In his lifetime, Gunn was often positioned as an incongruent peer to Ted Hughes and The Confessionals. Yet Gunn, by his own rhetoric, was not a confessional poet. As an expatriate, his work evokes an oozing liminality that is addressed in an interest in the body and masculinity—ranging from cowboys to Elvis. Poems set in iambic pentameter and formal rhyme schemes speak about motorcycle-clad emblems of a brazen American masculinity and layered with double-entendres on gay male sexuality. The most interesting moments in Gunn’s poetry occur with a metaphorical preoccupation with the intimacies between the interior and exterior self.

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.

A new edition of selected poems by Makoto Ooka, translated by Janine Beichman and entitled Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets, is a treasure chest for lovers of Japanese poetry and poetry in general. Ooka was one of the most revered poets and critics in Japan, and Beichman, is a masterful translator of Ooka’s work. This is the third anthology of Ooka’s poetry she has translated. Beichman captures the stark simplicity of Ooka’s language as well as the Western influences on his work. Ooka himself approved her translations, and he knew English poetry well. He even reciprocated by translating one of her Noh plays.

In this interview with nonfiction MFA candidate Sarah Rosenthal, author Lisa Gornick discusses her latest novel, The Peacock Feast, as well as writing about real historical figures in fiction, the many overlaps between writing and psychology, how design and architecture can inform the writing process, and much more.