Columbia Journal is delighted to announce the shortlist for our Special Issue on Loneliness. Our dedicated team of readers and editors culled through a pool of more than 400 submissions that were each uniquely moving.

Rome 32 BCE
1. There are no memories here. There is, instead, a rose garden on a hill.
2. Dark vines clutch broken columns.
3. Blossoms swell like wounds

The genre of literary fiction in the Indian subcontinent has always been hard to come by. I think fondly of fiction by Ruskin Bond, Vikram Seth, and Amitav Ghosh. Then I think a little more because I want to think of women. I think of Arundhati Roy. I stay in that little bubble, re-reading The God of Small Things, over and over.

I saw my father’s penis for the first time in my life today.

As a general rule, a single person should not live with a couple – it is a recipe for heartbreak – but back in those days, the three architecture students did not know that. They found a cavernous apartment near the university and moved in together. Back in those days, rents in Cambridge were low, but this place was ridiculously cheap, eight hundred dollars a month. It was a dump. A fourth-floor walk-up, barely any heat, horsehair insulation in the walls, but the windows faced north, flooding the apartment with golden light.

We grow up thinking love is effortless, or at least I did – that you find someone, you just “know,” and then you trail off towards a sunset that is the rest of your life. We see it in movies, in perfectly arced stories with happy endings, but out here, in the real world, love is rarely a straight shot to paradise. In fact, what is most ironic about the Happy Ending trope is how the story cuts off before we see the bumpy, nauseating cycle of push and pull that so often exists after two people have decided they love each other.

Ander Monson is not like most writers. While others strive to have one book out in the world at a time, Monson has made it a habit of publishing twin volumes simultaneously. His short story collection, The Gnome Stories (Gray Wolf Press, 2020) is partnered with a book of essays titled I Will Take The Answer.

Some Trick: Thirteen Stories is Helen DeWitt’s third book in nearly two decades. It begins with a two-page mock-epigraph called “Here Is Somewhere.” The section riffs off “We’re Off to See the Wizard” from The Wizard of Oz, except the rhyme scheme is interrupted by gainsay ideology, because because because:

Anne Enright’s latest novel Actress begins with a question: “What was she like?”. The she in question is Katherine O’Dell, famous actress of the stage and screen, an Irish icon and, most importantly, the mother of our narrator, Norah. It’s a question that sounds simple and it’s one that Norah is asked frequently enough to anticipate its patterns: she knows that whoever is asking will search her face for resemblances with “a growing wonder, as though recognizing an old flame after many years”. She knows that sometimes they want to know what Katherine was like as a mother, or as a “normal person […] in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade”. And she knows that usually they are asking what Katherine was like before her infamous mental breakdown, “as if their own mother might turn overnight, like a bottle of milk left out of the fridge”. But this deceptively simple question continually haunts the novel: what was she like? Not who was she, really? Or, what did you think of her? But what was she like? The phrasing here is important because Enright is, from the very offset of her novel, insinuating that we are remarkably satisfied with just that: what things are “like”, how things seem. And by doing that, she is setting us up for the questions that inevitably follow: if this is just how things seem, then when will we know how they really are?

UPDATE: Submissions for this special issue are now closed. We look forward to reaching out to our winners in the near future. Keep checking our site for upcoming special issue and contest submission opportunities (and for daily content, of course), or submit for regular publication at any time to our open categories, which are updated in the Submit section at the top right of our homepage or viewable in our Submittable portal.

Stephen Graham Jones has never been boxed in by genres. The prolific horror writer proudly wears that label on his sleeve, leaning into schlocky tropes of the trade in his new novel, The Only Good Indians. It’s unabashedly a slasher, and blood is plentiful, but a deeper layer runs through the material as Jones, a Blackfeet native, uses the trappings of horror to delve into a dissection of contemporary Native American identity.

Max Asher Miller, Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal for 2020-2021, spoke with Stephen Graham Jones about his forthcoming novel, The Only Good Indians, a bloody book with eyes on cycles of violence, basketball, and what it means to navigate Native American identity.

Mary South’s debut story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, presents a delightful opportunity to be as unsettled by your literary fiction as you are by your News Feed. The obsessions in these stories—loneliness, shame, the taboos surrounding the expression of desire and need—emerge as her characters often unsuccessfully attempt to tackle their grief, using technology to abate it in ways that are destined to spectacularly and tragically fail.

The thing about telling a story—any story—is that you inevitably find yourself defending it before an audience. This is true of board room discussions, it is true of testimonies. And it is true of writing. If you’re lucky enough to escape the travails of workshops or writer’s rooms unscathed, you’re confronted with well-meaning readers who ask you, in a room full of people, to defend your fiction.

Nigerian writer Ukamaka Olisakwe’s upcoming novel, Ogadinma Or, Everythng Will be All Right does a thorough job of painting the different shades of patriarchy. Expected in June 2020 by the Indigo Press, the book is set in the 1980s Nigeria and chronicles the life of Ogadinma, a 17-year-old girl, whose dream of pursuing a university education gets thwarted by a rich lawyer.

Bill Murray won’t leave the apartment. Get off the couch, I say. Bill Murray gives me his hangdog look. It’s not as attractive in real life as it is in the movies. I don’t feel moved when you look at me that way, I say. That’s what they always say, Bill Murray says. Bill Murray puts a cushion over his head as if that resolves it. I stamp my feet and point to the door. Leave, I say. From under the cushion comes a snore. I know you can hear me, I say. Outside, birds are waking. Inside, Bill Murray is fake sleeping. I’m warning you, I say. But Grace will miss me, Bill Murray says, voice muffled. Grace is asleep in her crib. Grace won’t even notice, I say, but I hesitate as always and Bill Murray stays.

The man lies face down on the pavement. I stare at his back and try to focus on a point to see whether or not it is rising or falling. It is difficult to distinguish a flutter of wind that ripples across the surface of his shirt from genuine breath. At four o’clock, the light is so honeyed and abundant that it catches the glint of mica in the pavement, making this task nearly impossible. I want to be close to a dead body so I can have an experience, like it is some holy relic that has the power to change me. I could tell my husband that I had had a very interesting afternoon. The anecdote might even have a life longer than that—I could feasibly trot it out at dinner parties for the next month or so.

The End
As the poet David Berman once said: just because everyone has died so far / doesn’t mean that we’re going to.
He killed himself, which goes to show that poems are easy to misunderstand, at least according to my students. I don’t teach anymore.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our annual Spring Contest, which was judged by Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction. We want to thank everyone who entered the Contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. Winners and runner ups will be posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2020.

The nurse greets Leo from behind the apartment’s steel security door. Starched white uniform and too much Chanel No. 5, a paper nurse’s hat pinned to her messy, grey-streaked up-do. Leo’s no stranger to hospitals—he only just stretched the Bellevue psych ward I.D. bracelet off his wrist during the ferry ride over from lower Manhattan. But until now he’s never seen a nurse in anything but teal scrubs and a lanyard. Staten Island, always keeping it old school.