In late 2013, nineteen-year-old Ayan and sixteen-year-old Leila abruptly departed their adopted home of Norway to join the Syrian jihad. They are the daughters of Somali immigrants Sadiq and Sara, and in Two Sisters, Åsne Seierstad tracks the devastation the family suffers in the wake of their departure and looks back in time to examine how two young women could become radicalized.

The law gives him a fifteen-minute break every four hours, the cashier tells the supervisor (who engineered bridges for the US Army in his country of origin), and bathroom visits don’t count.

Sally Wen Mao’s stunning second collection, Oculus, focuses not just on sight but on the politics of seeing—its intimacies, failures, elusions, evasions. Oculus in Latin means eye, but it is also a circular opening in the center of a dome or wall. In French, this translates to œil de boeuf, or bull’s eye.

One
“What do you mean you can’t swim without those things?”

Whether you are a lover of Korean literature or someone entirely unfamiliar it, Heinz Insu Fenkl’s new translation of Kim Man-Jung’s 17th-century masterpiece The Nine Cloud Dream, recently published by Penguin, will be a revelation. Unlike earlier translators, such as James Scarth Gale and Richard Rutt, Fenkl attempts to recreate the experience of the novel’s first readers. This approach is fraught with difficulties because The Nine Cloud Dream, Korea’s most famous and best-loved work, was set in the China of almost a millennium before its composition and written in Chinese. According to the translator, that makes his task analogous to translating a 19th-century Russian work set in medieval France and written in Old French.

To find the limits of your own tolerance, try having a child. I found mine after giving birth to my daughter in Morocco, in the thousand-year-old city of Fes. I was finishing my time of wanderlust, of living and traveling in India, Mexico, Fiji, Spain, New Zealand, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. During my travels, I had sat for meals in tiny clay huts, eaten with un-sanitized hands the meat of animals recently alive; I had walked through forests to find ancient monasteries, boated across choppy seas to visit the beehive huts of crazed ascetics; I had filled my mind with the religions of Jains and Muslims, Catholics and Christians, pagans and the most devout; I learned bits of Czech, Arabic, Spanish, and French; made myself the laughingstock of all as I spoke my broken words, somehow effectually communicating my need for food, housing, friendship; I had eaten late night Spanish dinners, drunk late morning beers in Prague, sucked on cane sugar while stuck on a train in the Indian desert; and I had endured groping men, racist statements, patriarchy in forms outright and tacit, and many other tests.

“This is my skin. This is not your skin, yet you are still under it.” – Iain Thomas

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.

Jean Fremon’s latest work, Now, Now, Louison, translated beautifully from the French by Cole Swensen, could be described as a new possible answer to an ethical problem long-debated and long-agonized over by conscientious writers of fiction and nonfiction alike: what gives someone the authority to write about a real person? And, following that: what happens when you write about someone you love and admire, and give them a sort of second life in the written word? How much of this authority is real? How much is imagined?

We’re delighted to announce the new print issue of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Columbia Journal’s Issue 57 features work by Jenny Holzer, Patti Smith, Jesse Paris Smith, Eileen Myles, Duy Doan, Lili Kobielski, Donika Kelly, and more. Read more about Issue 57 in Editor in Chief Adrian Perez’s Editor’s Note below. Issue 57 was published in May 2019, and you can order a copy now.

In her debut memoir Mother Winter, writer Sophia Shalmiyev takes the reader through her experience growing up in the Soviet Union with an alcoholic mother and her subsequent search for replacement mother figures upon her move to the United States when she is relocated by her father in 1990 at the age of eleven. A story of love and loss, searching and mourning, Shalmiyev’s journey climaxes as she realizes that the mother she is looking for is not someone she can find— rather “motherhood” is an exploration she’ll have to make herself.

Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work is a masterpiece. Set during the Syrian Civil War, the novel chronicles three siblings who seek to honor the dying wish of their father: to be buried in his hometown of Anabiya next to his sister, Layla.

Whatever they are, I’m sending them your way,
right now, eyes closed for better aim,
a micro-meter sub-atomic process, plucked and

“My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland,” begins Nora, one of the many narrators from Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Other Americans. It’s the event that shapes the novel, establishing the foundation for a story that reflects on the hollowness of grief, the weight of secrets, the challenges of family, and the meaning of home.

i want
to reply
about it all

The original Yiddish version of this story was published on November 3, 1917, in the newspaper Di Varheyt. It has been translated into English, for the first time, by Jessica Kirzane.

T. Fleischmann’s essay, Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through, is a balancing act of various genres. It’s non-fiction piled on top of an art critique balanced on photographs and spun around by poetry. The narrative, however, keeps a consistent thread of hunger and searching that is never frustrating and always disarming. The author’s quest to assert their existence and their right to belong brushes against questions of love and loss, violence and courage, gender and sexuality, art and perception.

Summertime meant heat and boredom, a blanket of stagnant damp. Dead mussels lined the shore, rotting in the sun, and the seagulls pecked and cawed, white-winged sociopaths, scavenging. Rob Kentz, who they called Clark Kentz because he looked like Superman, was on lifeguard duty, so All-American, though Superman was supposed to be an alien. I watched him watch, whistle between lips, thinking I could never be a lifeguard, because concentrating on the now is not my strong suit. What if you forget, get sidetracked thinking about the vast, unknowable macrocosm of the ocean, and forget to look for the signs of drowning, which don’t really look like drowning at all?

In this interview, MFA candidate Jai Hamid Bashir talks with Ross Gay about his new nonfiction book, The Book of Delights. Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

A notable achievement in contemporary Spanish artistic output, Nocilla Trilogy, by Augustin Fernández Mallo, is a beguiling, humorous, and challenging collection which explores the role of writing in the 21st century. With splintered narratives threaded through hundreds of chapters of varying length—from a few sentences to over eighty pages—Fernandez Mallo illustrates his thoughtful aesthetic strategy, fueled by an epistemological urgency, to shape contemporary approaches to literature in the information age.