“Hello.” This time it was a sing-songy voice, twinkling with melody. They were all so different and yet, somehow, few sculpted a mental image in Diana’s mind. With each hello, she heard suggestions of the words that would follow, but often she saw only the gray of the screen, the purple logo, and the highlighted row of the call list.

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.

Love of Distance

I remember when I was in my mother’s house,

in the middle of the plain,

I had a window that looked out

over the meadows; at the end, the woody embankment

hid the Ticino and, beyond that,

there was a dark strip of hills.

Then I hadn’t seen the sea

but that one time, but I kept for it

a fierce nostalgia of the lover.

Toward evening I used to stare at the horizon;

I’d narrow my eyes a little; caress

the contours and the colors between my eyelashes;

and the strips of hills would stretch out,

flickering, blue: it seemed to me the sea

and I liked it more than the true sea.

Milan, 24 April, 1929

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.

My sign turns heads. Some cars slow, most pass but all read.

TO

WAR

VIA LA

USMC

Boldface caps spaced wide on thick gray poster board that won’t bend in wind, backed by a flat board long enough to hoist sign higher than head. Legible for eyes approaching fast, or stopped at a traffic light with me standing half a football field ahead on right.

I came back from Vietnam with a chest full of medals and a head full of nightmares, a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder, the dreaded PTSD. I can’t count the number of times I’ve woken up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and sat bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat, my body tense, tingling all over, knowing I was about to die, reliving the worst moment in my life as if it were happening right now, instead of happening long ago in a place far, far away?

“The Hypnotist Suggests the Word Home”

^{Labyrinth, rapture, salvo. The release, all at once, a rack of rockets, a salve. Dismantling}

^{the elk nest,}

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?

Lassitude

It is from these long days of indescribable sickness

Where we would like to sleep the heavy sleep of the dead;

From these hours of anguish where existence weighs

On the soul and on the body.

So we search in vain for a gentle thought,

A joyful image, a rich memory;

The soul fights for an instant, and finally falls again, drooping

Under its deep troubles.

So all that enchants and all that we enjoy

Has for our open eyes only deceptive brightness;

And the dreamed happiness, if it comes, cannot exactly

Overpower our fatigue.

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to Carmen Maria Machado about her new memoir, In the Dream House. The book explores domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship. Carmen is also the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

In your third month we buy a manger at Babies R’ Us.

“Some Assembly Required,” you read on the box.

“That could be stamped on the side of you too,” I say. We both laugh. The college kid dollying the box smiles like he’s indulging his parents.

Elton John’s “Your Song” plays above on the store speakers. “That’s your song,” I say.

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.

Storms pelted New York on Tuesday as Andrew Lewis sat down with Lis Harris at Book Culture on 112th to discuss his debut book, The Drowning of Money Island: A Forgotten Community’s Fight Against the Rising Seas Threatening Coastal America. The weather was appropriate given that his book centers on the aftermath of another storm, Hurricane Sandy, and its effects on the South Jersey Coast.

You will always exist in the universe in one form or another — Suzuki Roshi

While it’s been known for over a century that a mother’s cells can travel through her placenta into her unborn child, it wasn’t until 1979 that scientists discovered that the reverse is also true, finding Y-chromosome cells in a pregnant woman’s blood. In 1996 a geneticist found male fetal cells in a woman’s blood 27 years after she gave birth. These “microchimeric cells”—cells of one person that have embedded themselves into the bodies of another—are named after the monstrous fire-breathing she-creature Chimera from Greek mythology, whose sighting was an omen of disaster. The infamous 15th-century anti-witchcraft treatise Malleus Maleficarum cast women as the embodiment of Chimera, describing her as a “monster […] of three forms; its face was that of a radiant and noble lion, it had the filthy belly of a goat, and it was armed with the virulent tail of a viper.” In other words, the treatise explained, those who embody the Chimera are “beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep.”

1. Mise en scène: Sometimes in your bed, but mostly ours is a love in exteriors, in undesirable spaces where we overlay ourselves and make like nest-bodies for one another. Maybe, we would stay out more–if we felt more held.

I

Circa 1960

Alor Star, Malaysia

3pm. Mama’s frying peanuts for the party tonight. Plates of handmade spring rolls line up, waiting for the sizzling peanuts to be done. When Mama’s not looking, I dip my finger into the bright red rose syrup sitting in the pot to cool by the window. Delicious. Heady. Not that anyone’s going to notice the color on my finger in the dark when Papa turns down the lights and the dancing begins. Papa loves to dance.

No one in our leafy suburb had ever seen anything like the yurt. When I was seven and Sachi was ten, Dad built Sachi her “reading yurt” in our backyard. It was fifteen feet tall with a white cone roof. He hung shiny stars and planets from its inner lattice rafters. Mom said she didn’t mind the yurt, but she missed looking out back into the uninterrupted horizon of towering trees.