On a Wednesday afternoon in January, my phone lit up with a text message from Wes. I hadn’t heard from him in two days, and my creeping suspicions that he had forgotten about me, that I meant nothing to him, were relieved for the moment.

In summer, everyone is a body of water. This makes sense only if you believe in a general equilibrium of all things. The land dries like a parched white tongue and yet there is leaking everywhere. The sky breaks open, fault lines rupture, secretions bead on burnt skin. There is lethargy and a constant drowsiness from the heat. There is no escape from the light. Even nightfall pulls water from your body, the ground settling, cooling before it fires again with the sunrise. In summer, everyone is a body of water simmering in the center of an oven.

In this interview, Columbia MFA graduate Caroline Bodian talks with Abbigail N. Rosewood about her debut, If I Had Two Lives. The novel is grounded in certain realities, realities of immigration and complex, yet enduring, female friendships, of loss and motherhood. Take a closer look and you’ll find a funhouse of mirrors, intense echoes, shifting parts, and blurred boundaries.

The fingers fit perfectly, as did the wrists and hands. Not because his hands were delicate or small, but because hers were thick and work worn and because she kept her own skin on when she slipped into his. The arms she had to pin and tuck under the pits. The torso she let out here and there, pulling and replacing stitches to accommodate her soft middle, her moderate breasts. She was careful not to leave marks or add new holes or show her work, lest he find out. But she was an expert seamstress. That’s why he’d married her. There were other things between them, but those skills were her greatest asset—the one most relevant to a man who wore his skin as a suit during the day and shed it each night.

Accompanied by hope, escorted by desire, Kroll drove five hundred miles north to a dock where the road ended, and the sea began. There, still at the wheel of his leased silver Infiniti, Kroll entered the belly of a great ferry and was transported through mist to an island where he couldn’t find a place to have breakfast.

The law gives him a fifteen-minute break every four hours, the cashier tells the supervisor (who engineered bridges for the US Army in his country of origin), and bathroom visits don’t count.

“This is my skin. This is not your skin, yet you are still under it.” – Iain Thomas

Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work is a masterpiece. Set during the Syrian Civil War, the novel chronicles three siblings who seek to honor the dying wish of their father: to be buried in his hometown of Anabiya next to his sister, Layla.

“My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland,” begins Nora, one of the many narrators from Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Other Americans. It’s the event that shapes the novel, establishing the foundation for a story that reflects on the hollowness of grief, the weight of secrets, the challenges of family, and the meaning of home.

The original Yiddish version of this story was published on November 3, 1917, in the newspaper Di Varheyt. It has been translated into English, for the first time, by Jessica Kirzane.

Summertime meant heat and boredom, a blanket of stagnant damp. Dead mussels lined the shore, rotting in the sun, and the seagulls pecked and cawed, white-winged sociopaths, scavenging. Rob Kentz, who they called Clark Kentz because he looked like Superman, was on lifeguard duty, so All-American, though Superman was supposed to be an alien. I watched him watch, whistle between lips, thinking I could never be a lifeguard, because concentrating on the now is not my strong suit. What if you forget, get sidetracked thinking about the vast, unknowable macrocosm of the ocean, and forget to look for the signs of drowning, which don’t really look like drowning at all?

“Can I see, Mama?” Gretchen tugged on her mother’s mini dress.

“In a minute,” she answered sharply, struggling with a piece of poster board. “I’m tryin’ to make the pinhole the right size.”

In this interview, MFA candidate Katie Shepherd talks to Valeria Luiselli about her new novel, Lost Children Archive.

I rode the train to Midway Airport, praying it was going to work this time. It hadn’t worked last time. Cindy was too timid, too needy. But when I saw my older sister laughing as she pulled her baby blue suitcase off the baggage belt, I was more optimistic. There was no sign of the beaten-down blonde I put on a bus 16 months ago. She looked taller and blonder, and when I told her that she said she loved my new Dutch cut.

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her most recent book, the novel Heat and Light, won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Her previous books include FAITH; THE CONDITION; BAKER TOWERS; MRS. KIMBLE, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; and the short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

Gary Smalls never thought he’d work at a place like the Corporation. He was a recent college graduate in Future Studies, broke and sticky-fingered, with a plump, boisterous girlfriend named Molly who made love to him like heaven was on fire. And he wanted to marry her. He wanted to marry Molly and give her the obstreperous, round-faced, donut-inhaling children she dreamed of, but his degree in Future Studies was as meaningless as his first hand job as a teen—it was fun, even enlightening, but ultimately inconsequential, much like Gary was starting to feel himself.

They were boys with big dreams of being doctors, and lawyers, and businessmen. Tonight, they were stuck in the sandbox digging for buried treasure. Oogoo Poogoo had the shovel. He was the youngest of them all. 18. Freshman at Oklahoma State, digging for buried treasure in the sandbox behind an abandoned elementary school. Where had he gone so wrong? Bid, Rush, Pledge, Frat. All of it a mistake. Now Oogoo Poogoo needed to find sixty-six cents in a child’s sandbox to make it into Theta Delt. If he could find it, he’s to save his spot in the fraternity.

In this interview, MFA fiction student Sophia Mansingh talks to writer and chair of the Columbia University fiction program Sam Lipsyte. Lipsyte is the bestselling author of Home Land; Venus Drive; The Fun Parts; and The Ask. He has also been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, and Playboy. He was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.

Once Upon A River arrived in my new, American mailbox mere days after my British visa expired. I spent the last three years living in London, and this book immediately transported me back to England, but not the England I know. It is not one of nightclubs and gentrification, but instead a gothic land pulled straight out of fairytales, where dragons are the topic of small talk and ghosts are commonplace, not debated. The inhabitants of this tale understand its logic, philosophizing at one point that ‘…just ‘cause a thing’s impossible don’t mean it can’t happen.’

These three stories by legendary writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa were translated from the original Japanese by Ryan C.K. Choi.