Kristopher Jansma’s work isn’t just about the lives of writers; we all tell stories, published or unpublished. We don’t all have to be idealists, but we can all have ideals.

Have you ever watched someone eat an orange and not had the urge to ask, Could I have a piece, please? If you have, then I’m afraid you might be stronger than most / The orange is dined on delicately / She requires care, from start to finish / Even the tearing of her sheath must be done with care or else you sacrifice parts of her fleshy sweetness—first to the rind, then to the compost […]

Jess Richards’ memoir Birds and Ghosts is peppered with pencil sketches of birds—peppered because the specks of bird appear like grains of pepper, coalescing into network structures. Poetry, lyric essay, memoir, prose poetry, occult reflections, and sketches join to form a map, a network, shaped like a brain by connections and synaptic firings.

Superman has nothing on my older brother when he’s high on crack. Muscles tensed, jaw clenched, underwear drenched in piss, standing in the hallway of my mother’s walk-up, years before her death and still more before Tommy winds up beaten down in a half-way house for Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICA) patients […]

The Guest is all about nonattachment. It follows a twenty-two-year-old woman named Alex as she is expunged from the home of Simon, the wealthy older man she has been staying with for the summer. The narrative action clings, as though in real time, to the five days she is left to wander the “wilderness” of Long Island’s East End, until a party on Labour Day, when Alex hopes to re-attach herself to Simon, and the trappings of his rarefied life.

Austrian writer Monika Helfer’s 2020 novel Die Bagage—recently released in English under the title of Last House Before the Mountain (Bloomsbury, April 2023), and translated by Gillian Davidson—is a story of home and homeland, of belonging and alienation, of secrets that span generations.

Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough is Dina Nayeri’s second and latest nonfiction book, released in March. The book balances powerful case studies with the deeply personal as Nayeri analyzes why those who are most vulnerable are often dismissed and disbelieved. It’s a large topic, but she doesn’t stray away from complex ideas and questions such as truth and facts. Instead, she makes them digestible for the reader and expands our worldviews while folding us into that long, slow work of believing.

By Matthew Gonzalez

I was at a loss for words when I first read Gonzalo Rojas’s “Numen.” I couldn’t find any solid ground in the distance between the images he uses. After a dive into the body of Spanish-language criticism of Rojas, it’s my position that to evade meaning is the meaning of “Numen.”

The only son Garry wanted wasn’t even a blood son. A reject, a castoff. Thomas, this non-son, had a forehead scooped into a kind of slight horn. Pinched-out lips. Laugh like a throttled chicken. But Garry knew from his years training airborne cadets that without him, the boy’s life was a coin flip: Thomas, a fatherless fuck-up, or Thomas, a true leader of men.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2022 Print Contest, which was judged by Jonathan Escoffery, Qian Julie Wang, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Valzhyna Mort. […]

“What would the history of literature look like if it began, not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes, but with a woman from ancient Iraq, who sang her hymns to […]

Today at work I walked in on Sarah in the work bathroom adjusting her outfit in the full-length mirror, she jumped when I opened the door. I found myself thinking […]

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018). She translates contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy and is Assistant Professor of English […]

I cried while sitting on the toilet the other day. It’s not what you think, I promise. The culprit was not a sour taste of spoiled food or night of drinking […]

What does it take to achieve our childhood dreams? What do our ambitions teach us about ourselves? Since its publication in 1998, Homer Hickam’s coming-of-age memoir Rocket Boys, about the […]

A Review of the Monk’s Work, Teachings, and Legacy 1 Year After His Death Known for his teachings on Buddhism and how to bring mindfulness—the idea of being aware of […]

The woman, in order to have sex with her husband, had to write it all out after it happened. When they were young, before the kids, and they had sex […]

The woman, in order to have sex with her husband, had to write it all out after it happened. When they were young, before the kids, and they had sex […]

Cheyenne and I are in her bathroom applying our makeup under the drop lights her dad got for cheap. It’s her very own half bath with double sinks so we […]

2022 Columbia Journal Print Contest – Submissions Open from December 15, 2022, to December 31, 2022 January 15, 2023 The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2022 Print […]