Joe had a sturdy mustache and a firm handshake. He didn’t say much to us at the airport, just loaded us into the back of his flatbed truck and gunned it. As he picked up speed, the wind cooled and whipped my hippy hair against my face. Fifteen minutes later, we were parked at the docks.

The white wild horse
Conceitedly stood at the stall
Contemplating the wretched chest of plains

There was a corner of blue in Bastian’s otherwise brown eyes, a touch from his father, he told me. He was handsome, a young carpenter from Paris spending a summer in Seattle. With dark curls and a broad forehead, he had an eternal five o’clock shadow that felt like sandpaper against my palm, or according to the French, like a piece of toast – rasé avec une biscotte. Toast or sandpaper, I loved watching the creases of his face break into a boyish smile.

The first day
is a memory unlived. A series,
confused slides in an archive.

Wentworth sat alone in his apartment on New Year’s Eve, daydreaming about a reading party held in honor of his debut novel, which in reality remained unfinished. The well-dressed guests sipping coffee and cognac, the dimly lit library with mahogany chairs and velvet cushions, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf walls; it was a magical scene. He allowed these images to take hold of him as though for the first time, when in fact they had played out in his mind before, like a film on repeat.

Leyton Cassidy, Podcast Editor for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Diane Cook to discuss her debut novel, The New Wilderness, as well as her writing process, relationship with nature, and the religion of writing. The New Wilderness takes place in the near future, where a group of people have elected to live in what remains of a protected wilderness area. The reader follows Bea and her daughter as they struggle to connect, thrive, and simply make it through to the next sunrise. Since its July release, The New Wilderness has already been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Cook is also the author of a collection of short stories, Man V. Nature, which has received worldly recognition.

Familiar facets of our modern existence—the kinds of things that trend on Twitter—loom large in Friends and Strangers, the fifth novel from J. Courtney Sullivan, out this summer from Knopf. It follows Elisabeth, a New York writer displaced in the suburbs with her husband and newborn son, and Sam, a college student Elisabeth hires as a babysitter. Swirling around them are such attractions as a student rally against unequal pay for university workers, tiffs and tussles within a popular mommy Facebook blog, a social influencer chasing bikini-brand deals, and a book idea decrying the loss of the American identity. It’s a novel that reminds you just how hyper-aware the world has become since, say, the early 2010s—the war between genders, races, classes—and yet never loses sight of its timeless keystone: the strength of the bonds built by women, between women. This, coupled with the trials of stale love, and a fair few lies and secrets, comes together in a story that, at the heart of its 400-something pages, chips away at the stunning intimacy we can sometimes share with strangers.

“In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and a characters that take up residence between the think border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing conventions, literary and otherwise. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, mordant and jagged” Wave Books stated in their press release.

I want my mom. I do. I may be thirty-five years old—too old for wanting mothers—but I’m also thirty-five weeks pregnant. And I’m scared, I guess.

I stepped off a plane in Dar es Salaam, an energetic twenty-year-old in search of total transformation. I didn’t yet know that Tanzania’s commercial capital, nicknamed Bongo, was a fast-paced city where you had to use your brains to survive. All I knew was that it was home to a relatively affordable Swahili program at the nation’s oldest university. When my mother saw the pictures of the harbor in my guidebook, she gasped and said, “It looks downright Dickensian.” I hadn’t read Dickens yet, so I asked her what she meant. “Teeming,” she said. Going into my eight-week course, what I lacked in street smarts I made up for with an exceptionally hopeful heart.

We are grateful to the contributions of over 500 writers and artists producing around the word of our choosing: Uprising.

In The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, writer and journalist Jason Diamond, author of the memoir Searching for John Hughes, returns to the suburbs of his childhood and adolescence in an attempt to better understand their impact on American culture. From a distance of time and space, Diamond considers the suburb as both concept and place, an in-between defined in relation to the urban center—a place which, linguistically if not physically, lies “beneath” the city. Diamond’s gaze, astute and compelling, is critical not only of the object of its inquiry but also of itself—of the hesitant, intricate love we have for the places that shaped us.

I wake up with a Pangea of hives across my torso, stomach more red than white, blanching splotches tendrilling down my legs and up the inside of my arms. They went away over the weekend but are back now, pinpricked Monday night leeching into swollen Tuesday morning. I roll over, announce to my girlfriend Emily that I “definitely have leprosy,” and unpeel the covers to show her. She looks away in horror and I re-sheet myself. I don’t blame her. I’m disgusted too.

The value of art lies in the tale: he explained to me why he must search for the wood out of which he would carve his sculpture. It does not lie in the hands of an artist. It is not found in the chisel he uses nor in the cast to be applied, but in the wood that he chooses. It is not just a simple matter of deciding whether to use the firmness of kamagong or the pliability of batikuling; it is in the story behind the wood. A wood with a story. It must not be just any story as that of wood bought from a lumber mill. The story of how lumber was cut down from the trunk of the oldest trees from national parks and how these were slipped past politicians and soldiers with a little grease.

What is it about beauty that fascinates us, confuses us, shifts our perceptions of the world through memory and intimacy? In Bahar Orang’s new book, Where Things Touch, she begs a similar question, one that should be simple and yet continues to be one of time’s oldest conundrums: what is beauty? Orang’s narrative is one that resists categorization; combining poetry, nonfiction, and philosophy, she brings forth a book that challenges the reader to meditate on the same questions and insights that drove her through the process of writing, searching, and living. This book is not one with answers, but rather, thoughtful questions on what it means to be human, the ways in which aspects of the world remain undefinable, and the overwhelming power of intimacy, memory, and art.

On Wednesday, September 23, 2020 Columbia University, School of the Arts held its finale for “Translating the Future,” a 20-week series of conversations between translators, with “Translating for a World on Fire.” This final event featured Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headley, moderated by Columbia’s very own Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC) director, Susan Bernofsky.

If ever there were a season that needs a do-over, it’s summer 2020. The most expansive and languid of seasons has become stilted and bowed under the pandemic restrictions. There’s the enforced indoor time, the constant bad news, and the de rigueur doom scrolling to take in everything. Into this summer of our discontent comes poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book of essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. Here is everything that’s been missing: family, food, travel, immersion in nature, the abundance of the season, the time to slow down and savor. There’s so much to be dazzled by in the world, Nezhukumatathil reminds us. Pay attention.

li 力
in Chinese,

turned up-
side down

but I drowned. Roman had promised an island, where we could eat coconuts and our spouses would not find us. But open ocean was too far to follow him, so I slipped underwater and did not come back up.

My husband and I currently have a running joke about our son Ethan’s death. Despite Ethan’s best efforts to put distance between him, a teenager who obviously knows everything, and us, his parents who are old fogies, to the point of choosing a college halfway across the country, he’s now stuck with us. Forever. My husband’s plan is for all of us to share the same urn so that Ethan will literally be stuck with us. My plan is to take his urn with us on our travels so we can take family photos at all the tourist traps. I’m currently researching how to travel internationally with an urn. You would think that there’s not a lot of articles on that, but a quick Google search came up with almost 25 million results. I can just picture it—the three of us at the Tower of London, or maybe at Kings Cross Station at platform 9-3/4. We could even use one of the photos as our Christmas card.