When my mother was a baby her father threw her into the ocean so she would be forced to learn to swim. It didn’t work.

The good old days. That’s what everyone calls them. I remember them as being old. Dry, dead, endless heat. Days hiding from the sun. Nights with only stars for witnesses. Hours of nothingness, waiting outside a village, tracking movements. And minutes filled with whizzing bullets. Paah-paah when they left the gun. Chook-chook when they hit the sand just in front of me. Or whoosh-whoosh as they zoom into the trees and bushes behind me, stripping them of foliage—it’s easy to remember the sound of bullets when they don’t hit you.

“I can’t get my characters down the stairs,” says Lily King’s protagonist in Writers & Lovers, trying to convey her writer’s block. It is hard to believe the author herself has this problem, what with this being her fifth novel among award-winning successes (though like her character, Casey, it also seems she has been working on it for six years), but King certainly understands how the living of lives and the making of art can be in conflict with one another. It is a problem at the core of her latest work, one that is unafraid to be simultaneously humorous, intimate and insightful.

In this interview, Editor-in-Chief spoke with writer Sarah Ramey about her debut memoir, The Lady’s Handbook For Her Mysterious Illness (Doubleday), a book that examines the author’s years-long battle with an illness that doctors found themselves unable to diagnose and the overall treatment of women’s pain in the U.S. healthcare system. Here, she discusses the role structure plays in the work, the process of healing through research, and why she does not mind calling herself a “hope monger.”

In this interview, Sarah Gheyas spoke to Peter Frankopan about his latest book, The New Silk Roads, which looks at the shifting geopolitics and the rising global influence of industrial powerhouses of Central Asia. Peter Frankopan authored the highly acclaimed international bestseller, The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World (Bloomsbury 2018) and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury 2015), both of which have been translated into more than thirty languages. Other notable books include a revised translation of The Alexiad (Penguin Classics 2009) and The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Harvard University Press, 2012). He’s written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The London Evening Standard. Prospect Magazine named him One of the World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019. He currently chairs the Ondaatje Prize at the Royal Society of Literature, the Cundill History Prize and the Runciman Book Prize. He is professor of Global History at Oxford University, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is also the founder of the hotel franchise, A Curious Group of Hotels.

Ascendent Mexican author Fernanda Melchor makes her English-language translation debut with “Hurricane Season,” a whirling novel that rages ahead from the first page, when a group of boys discovers the town’s Witch floating dead in a drainage ditch. In chapter-long chunks of text, Melchor illustrates a troubled town’s response to this socially fraught incident of foul play. Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes, the book’s profanity-laden pages sustain its sense of dismal fury.

I had forgotten what wet felt like. Perspiration pooling from my pink water jug on the side table next to my hospice bed—how it grew. Clanking of ice cubes in my mother’s glass settling on top of the side table—how they created waves. Pellets of rain that leaked through the window sill—how they jumped from the ledge and awaited the floor. Even their mud, my fresh blood—how they created sludge on the cloudy floor. How they knew I was thirsty.

Nina St. Pierre speaks with author Paul Lisicky in this interview about his sixth book, the memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World. Set in the early ’90s, Later is a prismatic rendering of life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the height of the HIV and AIDs epidemic. In Later, Lisicky renders it a one-word mythology: “Town”—a location both in and out of time, where the synthesis between death, sex, and community, is nuanced, contradictory, and ultimately, life-affirming.

The first time I tried to quit I couldn’t sleep for three days, cried whenever I heard a familiar song on the radio, and set my favorite sweater on fire. We were watching TV and there was a cantaloupe-scented candle on the endtable, and my arm must’ve gotten too close to it, because the next thing I knew Robert had jumped up shouting. It’d been a few days since I halved my dose, so I figured that was the worst of it. But by the second week I could barely stand. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be this bad,” Robert said, sweeping up shards of a plate I’d dropped, and I guess I agreed.

Silences come in all sizes—big, small, comfortable, painfully uncomfortable, short gaps in conversation, small sighs between breaths, and entire eras worth of quiet. Sayed Kashua’s Track Changes explores these silences, these unsaid words across two countries, two continents, two national identities, and two personal identities. The backdrop of the story changes, the geography of the narration changes—but the silence remains.

A.
Draw a circle around yourself
and pray seventy years
for rain that it might come

In this interview, Columbia Journal online arts editor Jai Hamid Bashir talks to poet Jane Hirshfield about her ninth poetry collection ​Ledger​ ​(Knopf, March 10, 2020), a deeply observant and stunning text about our species relationship with this Earth, beauty, and ourselves.

The tip of the boat noses into the air. She leans into it as it rises, gripping the edge of her plastic orange seat, quietly daring the motion to throw her overboard, or at least out of herself. But the seat is bolted to the boat’s base and her grip survives—when the hull slaps down she sits, hard, but is exhilarated; she breathes in the salty spray as it baptizes her. Airways that reach all the way to her core begin to clear.

While reading Carolyn Chute’s new novel, The Recipe for Revolution, you will spend a good deal of time trying to figure out where she’s coming from. That’s because this book, which is the third in a sprawling, four-novel epic about the downfall of a survivalist-style cult called the “Settlement,” is an explicitly political text from top to bottom. In often-jarring style, with a polyphony of voices employed throughout, each scene is written from the perspective of a different character. But Chute, who has often referred to herself as “no-wing,” resists strict categorization at every turn.

The word BARE.
Everyone
Exposed

Welcome to the Anthropocene, to the daily awakening and reckoning with our drastic human impact on the planet. Amid the rapid-fire changes and staggering, ever-shifting projections, David Farrier steps into the conversation with his new book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, which invites us to consider “deep future”—a projection of far, far ahead—and the footprint we will leave behind. But Farrier, who is an English Literature professor at the University of Edinburgh, is not interested in merely facts and figures or simplistic doomsday thinking. He offers his own unique approach to consider deep future through the lens of narrative. Though not a scientist, Farrier is an expert in the power of stories and he is aware of their increased importance in the age of climate crisis. He uses stories to call us to action and to actively imagine our future and how we will be remembered. He poses a worthwhile question: what can stories offer us in considering the Anthropocene?

Crepuscular means
“active at twilight,”
but zoology does tend toward drama.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2019 Winter Contest, which was judged by Ruth Madievsky, Ada Calhoun, and Ottessa Moshfegh. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

I was introduced to Paola Antonelli— the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design from the Museum of Modern Art—at her lecture at the Lenfest Center for the Arts in October 2019, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. I didn’t know how it would feel to have the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design from the Museum of Modern Art stand in front of a decent, 140 or so person crowd and tell me that our extinction was imminent. I knew it to be true already, I learned it in high school in World History: Empires Fall. But I never had anyone say it right to my face. It felt like this:

An interview with Ruth Madievsky, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest poetry judge. Conducted by Matthew Dix, print poetry editor.