knowledge of all things (when well organized)
fits in the tight space of a
cranial

Over the weekend, I was combing through articles, pushing beyond my boundaries for social media consumption, and frantically scribbling notes, scrambling to find a way to channel my grief, anger, and frustration. I wanted to construct the perfect essay with a perfect argument, supported by so much irrefutable evidence that anyone who read it could, and would not be distracted by anything else. They would have to face the fact that there is racism in this country, often excused and overlooked, that comes in deadly forms. Then I asked myself, “why?” Why must I use rhetoric and go above and beyond in order to convince someone of my humanity; to prove that black people should be treated as equals and not be discriminated against due to the color of our skin? My life is not a research paper. My life is not an intellectual exercise and when I navigate the world I cannot treat it as such.

I was half asleep when Ma whispered into my ear that it was time to go. The sun had not yet risen, but light crept into the room from the half-opened window. I pulled off the chadar—the thin blanket we use in the warm summer months in Palakkad—an extra layer of skin that embraces us even when we don’t need its coarse cover.

We “took” walks. I think, because, caesurae are things we drink. At least, like medicine. Their application requires we swallow. The Schuylkill incorporates the Wissahickon near where Manayunk East Falls. Rivers, primordial techniques. How we put things in their place. Water, repeated Information. Solomon’s plume or Solomon’s seal? Forgotten identity questions. Where the river demarcates Mt. Airy, high-altitude drama, we call it gorge. Frequently, you break trod of my footfall. “I know this one,” you say. How we reach for accurate speciation. Differences contingent on what is pendulous v. what flowers in racemes.

The global conversation around data privacy and the surveillance state has exploded in the past three years – keeping pace with dramatic developments in current facial recognition technologies. But in her recent novel, Little Eyes, triple Booker nominee Samanta Schweblin moves away from state-level conversations, instead examining our complicated relationship with surveillance on a personal level. Set in the very near future, she presents an opt-in surveillance community where little eyes are not only watching you, you’re fully aware and pay $279 for them to do so. Welcome to the latest global fad: the kentuki.

It’s true, Covid-19 affected every facet of our existence, but we’re also all shaken up by the depth of systemic abuse in the United States. The editors at Columbia Journal share some of essential readings that are getting us through this difficult time.

It feels almost serendipitous that Olivia Laing’s essay collection Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency has been published during a global pandemic. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, another painful reminder of persisting police brutality against Black lives, an outpouring of collective rage and grief has led to protests across the country. These protests are happening against the backdrop of hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-related deaths, a failing federal government and economic collapse.

Ander Monson is not like most writers. While others strive to have one book out in the world at a time, Monson has made it a habit of publishing twin volumes simultaneously. His short story collection, The Gnome Stories (Gray Wolf Press, 2020) is partnered with a book of essays titled I Will Take The Answer.

Some Trick: Thirteen Stories is Helen DeWitt’s third book in nearly two decades. It begins with a two-page mock-epigraph called “Here Is Somewhere.” The section riffs off “We’re Off to See the Wizard” from The Wizard of Oz, except the rhyme scheme is interrupted by gainsay ideology, because because because:

Anne Enright’s latest novel Actress begins with a question: “What was she like?”. The she in question is Katherine O’Dell, famous actress of the stage and screen, an Irish icon and, most importantly, the mother of our narrator, Norah. It’s a question that sounds simple and it’s one that Norah is asked frequently enough to anticipate its patterns: she knows that whoever is asking will search her face for resemblances with “a growing wonder, as though recognizing an old flame after many years”. She knows that sometimes they want to know what Katherine was like as a mother, or as a “normal person […] in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade”. And she knows that usually they are asking what Katherine was like before her infamous mental breakdown, “as if their own mother might turn overnight, like a bottle of milk left out of the fridge”. But this deceptively simple question continually haunts the novel: what was she like? Not who was she, really? Or, what did you think of her? But what was she like? The phrasing here is important because Enright is, from the very offset of her novel, insinuating that we are remarkably satisfied with just that: what things are “like”, how things seem. And by doing that, she is setting us up for the questions that inevitably follow: if this is just how things seem, then when will we know how they really are?

UPDATE: Submissions for this special issue are now closed. We look forward to reaching out to our winners in the near future. Keep checking our site for upcoming special issue and contest submission opportunities (and for daily content, of course), or submit for regular publication at any time to our open categories, which are updated in the Submit section at the top right of our homepage or viewable in our Submittable portal.

“The Mormons Are Coming” opens Dayna Patterson’s recent poetry collection, If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, Winter 2020). The Mormons come with “cheese-and-potato casserole” and “a package of diapers” and “glowing faces with shiny hope.” Then, before a reader gets too comfortable in the lulling repetitions and list of endearing cultural images, the poem swivels: “My daughters ask Why do only boys pass the sacrament?” Then, “My daughters ask Why are all the statues of men?” By the poem’s end, we learn the speaker has “agonize[d] for half a decade’s doubt before deciding to leave.”

When my father died in 2015, my grandparents were suddenly left without their son. I often wonder what the difference is between grieving a child and mourning a parent. “There’s nothing so horrible as outliving your child,” I overheard my Nana tell a friend. “Losing a parent young is one of the worst things that can happen to a person,” my sister explained to one of her friends during another occasion.

Constructs of American Violence consists of nine small paintings, which are details of a Civil War monument and a Civil War era cannon that reside outside the city courthouse in Traverse City, Michigan. A common sight in many towns large and small in the United States, these paintings are an investigation of the scarred and weathered surfaces (physical and cerebral) of these very American constructs to violence.

Frances Cha is the author of the novel If I Had Your Face. She grew up in the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English Literature and Asian Studies. For her MFA in Creative Writing she attended Columbia University, where she received a Dean’s Fellowship. She worked as the assistant managing editor of Samsung Economic Research Institute’s business journal in Seoul and as a travel and culture editor for CNN International in Seoul and Hong Kong. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, V Magazine, WWD and The Believer among other publications. Most recently, her short story “As Long As I Live” was published in the Korean-language anthology New York Story (Artizan Books, Korea). She has taught Media Studies at Ewha Womens University, Creative Writing at Columbia University and Yonsei University, and lectured at Seoul National University. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters and spends summer in Seoul, South Korea.

Shalvi Shah is the Online Fiction Editor of Columbia Journal for the 2019-2020 year. She is pursuing a joint MFA in Fiction and Translation at Columbia University, where she is a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Here she speaks with Cha about her debut novel If I Had Your Face, and about art, men and women, Korean culture, and the wheels of writing.

In this interview, Jasmine Vojdani speaks with writer Porochista Khakpour about fragmented identity, being Iranian in America, regret, and her new book, The Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. In The Brown Album, Khakpour traces lifelong experiences of alienation and cultural confusion. Her family left revolutionary Iran and relocated to Los Angeles a year after her birth, but this was not the glitzy, gilded L.A. of Tehrangeles so often associated with Iranian America. These essays recount Khakpour’s horror of appearing “other” as a child, her uncanny attempts to alter her appearance and affinities in hopes of belonging, and the ways that 9/11 ultimately upended her understanding of her place as an immigrant in America.

Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by Christian iconography, especially the statues of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the saints, and especially with images of the cross. I attended a Catholic school from first grade through my sophomore year in high school, and consequently my classmates and I went to mass in the adjacent church several times a week, on top of going on Sundays with our families. Because I was an altar boy, I sometimes went to church every day of the week, as I was often called upon to serve on Saturdays, at weddings, and at funerals. Occasionally, I served two or three masses in a single day.

Stephen Graham Jones has never been boxed in by genres. The prolific horror writer proudly wears that label on his sleeve, leaning into schlocky tropes of the trade in his new novel, The Only Good Indians. It’s unabashedly a slasher, and blood is plentiful, but a deeper layer runs through the material as Jones, a Blackfeet native, uses the trappings of horror to delve into a dissection of contemporary Native American identity.

Max Asher Miller, Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal for 2020-2021, spoke with Stephen Graham Jones about his forthcoming novel, The Only Good Indians, a bloody book with eyes on cycles of violence, basketball, and what it means to navigate Native American identity.

Mary South’s debut story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, presents a delightful opportunity to be as unsettled by your literary fiction as you are by your News Feed. The obsessions in these stories—loneliness, shame, the taboos surrounding the expression of desire and need—emerge as her characters often unsuccessfully attempt to tackle their grief, using technology to abate it in ways that are destined to spectacularly and tragically fail.