I have started choking. Kung pao chicken. Rib medallions. Cheap steak. Sometimes I can wait it out, arms up, breathing deep, until the lump is gone. I can finish my meal. Sometimes I vomit. Two fingers. The tongue’s spongy heel. Last night my wife, Grace, woke up the baby to drive the three of us to the emergency room so the nurse could wake up a specialist to use her flexible camera to shove the chicken chunk deeper down my gullet. I was embarrassed and frustrated and hungry.

I already know what I’ll do. If Cedil doesn’t come back by the end of the year, I’ll go to my grandmother’s sitio. I’ll get a heifer, raise its calves, and ride around on my horse. Each day there’ll be plenty to do, and that’s better than hanging around here like a fool, dreaming about the island the rest of my life, remembering the games we used to play there, the things Cedil and Tenisão said, even the times we were terrified, like the day the raft almost sank with the three of us on it.

Published in the 2017 issue of Columbia Journal, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “This Should Explain It” sketches an imperfect mother to an imperfect daughter and spares neither from the harsh light of abjection that has become the hallmark of her work. Here, Moshfegh dredges the well of memory with ample quirkiness, pulling from it a tangle of grief, love, and strangeness that besets a daughter in the wake of her mother’s passing. In short: this should explain it.

In Justin Taylor’s elegiac short story “No Names,” a narrator reflects on his ephemeral but meaningful connection with a deceased poet. His recollections coalesce around a single evening in which the narrator shared a table with the poet at a neighborhood bar, surrounded by fellow writers with whom they drank, chain-smoked, and chatted about nothing in particular.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote herself into literary posterity with the 1966 release of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,“ a story told from the perspective of a teenager coaxed out of her house by a smooth-talking man and loosely inspired by the Pied Piper of Tucson murders. Likewise, this story—“November Morning”—boasts a young protagonist whose childhood is invaded by grim adult themes when his mother drags him and his siblings off to identify the dead body of her estranged husband.

As a mixed-race young woman, I find myself at all times both within and without my culture. For a long time, my ancestral background seemed to color my skin but not my personal life. Likewise, the narrator in Katherine Charriott Hou’s short story “Learning Chinese” comments that she, “…was thirteen years old when she became half Chinese.” Throughout this softly funny and subtly tragic piece, the narrator learns the cost of forced American socialization when her mother suddenly cannot speak English anymore. Together the unnamed narrator and her father immerse themselves in learning Chinese culture and language to accommodate the mother.

Yes, sir? You’re kidding, right? You can rough me up like the other guys, but I’m not going to call you sir. Dream all you want, I won’t say it, I’m not your dog. Mister Bakouche is all I owe you, and that’s just because I don’t know you. Maybe once we get better acquainted, I’ll end up calling you a total prick.

By Sabahattin Ali
Translated Aysel K. Basci

Translator’s Note: Sabahattin Ali’s short story, “The Voice,” is representative of the author’s thematic concerns. It describes an encounter between two educated urbanites and a village troubadour (ashik, in Turkish), through which the author highlights the incompatibility of the aesthetic ideals of the educated and more sophisticated elite living in Turkish cities and those of Turkish villagers in rural Anatolia.

Young adults who move back in with their parents after a period of living independently are known as “boomerang kids.” Once the subject of moral consternation by a commentariat convinced that excessive avocado-toast expenditures are all that stand between debt-burdened millennials and home ownership, “boomeranging” is no longer considered a troubling generational trend, but a fact of life. The Pew Research Center reported that, in February 2020, nearly half of all 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. lived with one or both parents. In the months that followed, the disruptions of the pandemic meant that the percentage of young people in the U.S. living at home broke a record set during the Great Depression.

My teeth hurt. A sip of cold water or a quick breath on an icy day was enough to make me wince. I compared my smile to the way it looked in old pictures: the gums were definitely receding.

If, like me, you’re eagerly awaiting the release of Jennifer Egan’s latest novel The Candy House next month, you’ll appreciate how serendipitous it felt to find this excerpt from her debut novel in the Columbia Journal archives.

I think often about grief writing and almost always in relation to how a professor once told me to underwrite grief, that to downplay it was the most effective way to portray the condition.

Hüseyin… Do you know who you are, Hüseyin, when you see the shining contours of your face in the reflection on the balcony door? When you open the door, stride across the balcony, and a warm breeze caresses your face and the setting sun glimmers between the rooftops of the apartments in Zeytinburnu like a giant tangerine? You rub your eyes. Maybe you’re thinking—maybe every obstacle and every conflict in this life was only there so that, one day, you could stand up here and know: I’ve earned this for myself. With the sweat of my brow.

Elsa has a problem: she is invisible to everyone. Published by Columbia Journal in 1999, “Elsa Minor” investigates the relationship among mental health, human faith, and absurdism.

Tech gadgets, outdoor-grilling gear, and novelty mugs are the gifts that we might expect a son to bestow upon his father. Not so in “World Champion,” a short story by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, translated from Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger and originally published in Columbia Journal’s forty-fourth issue. In this tale, a son honors his father’s 50th birthday with both a “gold-plated navel cleaner” and violent revenge.

The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2022 Spring Contest is now officially open for submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. Our judges this year are Garielle Lutz (fiction), Colleen Kinder (nonfiction), Natasha Rao (poetry), and Aaron Coleman (translation).

This is how it happened.
You or I got off the bus and met on the street. We held hands until I let yours drop because the sidewalks were crowded or my palm was sweaty or I wanted to hurt you. You tried to take it back, but I adjusted the strap of my bag or combed a loose piece of hair or dug in a pocket.

We make our way through the corners of the grand old building that houses the Buenos Aires Jewish Museum, following the guide—an elegant woman with a friendly smile—and looking at passing displays with old prayer books decorated in mother-of-pearl and gold leaf, a letter from Albert Einstein to the Argentine Jewish community, and even a table set with plastic food and electric candles in imitation of the Shabbat ceremony.

Garielle Lutz once called the sentence a lonely place. For Lutz, that lonely sentence is a site of beauty and complexity. She writes conventional stories with musical sentences.

In his 2015 review published in The Atlantic, Garth Greenwell heralded Hanya Yanagihara’s previous novel, A Little Life, as potentially “the great gay novel,” praising its perceptiveness in depicting the gay male experience in America and positing that the book was “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.” To some extent, Yanagihara’s latest novel, To Paradise, might be considered an even greater gay novel. Not only is it queer in its foregrounding of gay protagonists and socio-political themes of discrimination, non-traditional relationships, the AIDS epidemic, and racial and class-conscious intersectionality, but also in its upending of literary forms and transgressive world-building. Yanagihara excels at blending the recognizable with the inventive and also at times the absurd to tell tales of unconventional love, desire, and longing. Like its predecessor, To Paradise deserves a place on the mantel of esteemed genre-bending queer fiction, alongside Renee Gladman’s The Event Factory, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, and other novels engaged in radical world-building.