Amitav Ghosh is an Indian author of international acclaim who came to the world’s attention with the publication of his first novel, The Circle of Reason. The book was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Médicis étranger. He went on to author the Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies, a novel short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Ghosh’s work is known for exploring the themes of love, loss, communal violence, tradition and memory. His novels are predominantly historical, and typically populated with characters whose stories stretch across geographical boundaries and span the world, yet his home town of Calcutta and the influence of Bengali culture are never obscured. Ghosh’s background as a historian and an anthropologist is evident in his writing and in the meticulous research that precedes every novel, yet his mastery lies in being able to capture the human condition through epic periods in history.

My sign turns heads. Some cars slow, most pass but all read.

TO

WAR

VIA LA

USMC

Boldface caps spaced wide on thick gray poster board that won’t bend in wind, backed by a flat board long enough to hoist sign higher than head. Legible for eyes approaching fast, or stopped at a traffic light with me standing half a football field ahead on right.

In your third month we buy a manger at Babies R’ Us.

“Some Assembly Required,” you read on the box.

“That could be stamped on the side of you too,” I say. We both laugh. The college kid dollying the box smiles like he’s indulging his parents.

Elton John’s “Your Song” plays above on the store speakers. “That’s your song,” I say.

Last month, the Booker Prize committee raised literary eyebrows when they awarded the coveted international prize to two authors for the first time since 1992, when they made a rule never to do so again. I suppose rules are meant to be broken. You would certainly believe this if you were one of the two winners—Margaret Atwood with her highly anticipated The Handmaid’s Tale’s sequel The Testaments; and Bernardine Evaristo, who saw her lifetime sales double after the recognition of a novel about womxn, her eighth, Girl, Woman, Other. Its publication may mark the first time many Americans are reading the Anglo-Nigerian author.

When we grow up, where do we go? This is the question running through the heart of ​Find Me, Andre Aciman’s long-awaited sequel to his 2007 novel ​Call Me By Your Name​. Set decades after the ending of the first installment, we again find ourselves with Samuel, an illustrious but bumbling and lonely academic; Elio, Samuel’s son and a talented and dreamily idealistic pianist; and Oliver, the man with whom Elio had an affair, who has since developed his own brand of charismatic academic-cum-family man. What results is a story about time and how we watch it move endlessly forward and forward, while certain things stick with us and many memories don’t.

No one in our leafy suburb had ever seen anything like the yurt. When I was seven and Sachi was ten, Dad built Sachi her “reading yurt” in our backyard. It was fifteen feet tall with a white cone roof. He hung shiny stars and planets from its inner lattice rafters. Mom said she didn’t mind the yurt, but she missed looking out back into the uninterrupted horizon of towering trees.

Alice wondered if Marianne would connect the dots. She did. In about three minutes. “Wait. What’s the name of the ship?”

“The Sea Lyric,” Alice said.

“Wasn’t that the name of the first ship?”

Marianne meant the name of the ship Alice had taken for her first honeymoon, about one year ago.

“Yes,” Alice said. “Same one.”

Jessica puts her fingers all the way inside me like she is reaching up to hold my guts. I’m laying sideways on the bed with my underwear around my ankles, trying to stay cool about this. Her nails are sparkly and manicured to perfect points, like diamonds cut rough at the tip of her fingers.

My mother was a den mother, but she wasn’t fanatical about it. Unlike Mrs. Kerner—the scoutmaster’s wife and leader of our rival den—she didn’t own an official uniform, nor did she attempt to educate us in the finer points of scouting, stuff like knot-tying, fire-building, and secret hand­ shakes. She considered herself a glorified babysitter and pretty much let us do as we pleased at our meetings, just as long as we amused ourselves and kept out of her hair.

Eva Lou is a Taiwanese-born, American-educated writer who has called Hawaii, New York, Seoul, and Paris home. She has a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Lou’s short stories and poems have been anthologized in America and France. Her first collection of short stories, Rapture/d’extases, was published by Editions Lanore in France in a bilingual edition. Her novel-in-progress, QUIETUDE, is a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award. She is the founder of Madeleine Editions, an international independent publishing house for children.

The first-ever Columbia Journal Fall Contest is now open for submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and, for the first time, art. Our judges will be Akil Kumarasamy(fiction), Monica Sok (poetry), Emily Bernard (nonfiction), and Helena Anrather (art). The four winners of the Fall Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. At least three finalists will be selected and announced in each of the four genres in the fall. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is August 9th. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. More guidelines can be found here. You can read about our judges below.

“All the boys knew about that rotten spot,” describes the narrator of The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s searing novel set in Jim Crow-era Florida. The boys, students of Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory, are just that—boys, kids, those who were “tied up in a potato sack and dumped.”

Sylvie, the titular character of Jean Kwok’s third novel, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, a girl who learns her manners from etiquette books and studies designer brands as intently as her statistics textbooks. During her childhood, she lives with relatives in the Netherlands for nine years because her parents cannot afford to take care of her at home in Queens. Now in her thirties, Sylvie is married to an old-money husband and works as a management consultant. Her younger sister, Amy, envies her—for her elegant hips, her degrees from Princeton and MIT and Harvard, her even-keeled mind—and views herself as an “afterthought,” far from the spectacular path of assimilation even as she dreams of being a teacher. Awkward, bookish, and prone to falling in love with strangers, Amy is easily the novel’s most likable character.

Colm Tóibín has spent much of his career unearthing and troubling familial relations in works such as The Testament of Mary, Nora Webster, and New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families. This scholarly and writerly interview probes relationships presented by Tóibín between art and living, psychology and fiction, form and national identities, fiction and politics, art and sexuality, biography and narrative, the writing of a novel and our reading of it. Tóibín was invited as a visiting author to Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, where I was an instructor at the time. I was privileged to have dinner with him after his reading in March of 2010. Later at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Seattle, Washington during February of 2014, I attended a panel discussion session with Colm Tóibín and American novelist Rachel Kushner. Tóibín discussed a range of topics, including visual art, the historical novel, and the assertion of the writer within public discourse. In June of 2016, Tóibín responded to the following questions about relationships that permeate his writing, extending to the reader an invitation to rethink those relationships as he does in his fiction.

The Columbia Journal Online Editors are delighted to officially announce that the Columbia Journal Fall Contest is now open for submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and, for the first time, art. Our judges will be Akil Kumarasamy (fiction), Monica Sok (poetry), Emily Bernard (nonfiction), and Helena Anrather (art). The four winners of the Fall Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. At least three finalists will be selected and announced in each of the four genres in the fall. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is August 9th. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. You can read the full contest guidelines below.

The ways in which you are able to house stories within stories throughout White Dancing Elephants is mesmerizing. Several stories have aspects of nesting dolls, especially with the merging of myth and realism. How did the two influence each other?

The following short story “La coda” (“The Tail”) comes from Luigi Malerba’s posthumous collection Sull’orlo del cratere (2018, On The Edge of the Crater). It has been translated from the Italian by Anna Chiafele and Lisa Pike.

This couple, then, entered, without their knowing it, an unendurable zone, years in the making. Most nights they came back to their apartment in Greenpoint from their office jobs, though he returned thirty minutes before her. Then they ate, often take-out, and watched TV, often the latest cutting-edge series. It’s not that they didn’t speak, but they weren’t exactly thrilled to hear each other. They created a stagey type of interplay, with a lessening of surprises, so that everything was gists and gestures—the pretense often indicating the expected. Seven years they’d logged, five together, and they moved to Greenpoint just when the cool people left it, bemoaning the fact that their few important friends, who all lived in Brooklyn, rarely made the ponderous trip via the homunculus of the subway, the G.

In this interview, Columbia MFA candidate Jared Jackson speaks with Joshua Furst about his second novel, Revolutionaries, and sheds light on critical choices he made while crafting the book, which transports the reader to the 1960s—a period of love and violence, and a touchstone of cultural significance for those with visions of radical change and societal disillusionment. Filtered through the sharp voice of Fred, a grown-up child of the counterculture, Revolutionaries takes off the nostalgic, free-loving, psychedelic sunglasses of the period, and glares at the cost that idealism— genuine or otherwise—has on the relationships of those involved.

This short story by Jung Young Su won the New Writers Award in Fiction from Changbi Quarterly in 2014, and has been translated from Korean by Anton Hur.