If good creative writing sparks the instinct to write, The Shell Game provides ample embers to inspire a wide range of writers. Edited by Kim Adrian with a foreword by Brenda Miller, this new anthology published by The University of Nebraska Press is devoted to a type of nonfiction called the hermit crab essay. The hermit crab essay is a work whose form embodies the content in bold, literal, and symbiotic ways. (Think: an essay on accomplishments organized as a resume, a meditation on the daily grind written as a to-do list, etc.) When pondering this particular approach, where a lyric essay “borrows” another form to tell its story, Adrian muses that a hermit crab essay’s formal, often bizarre looking exterior can allow it to “exert its full magic, tempting one’s inner aesthete with its very oddness, forcing upon its readers a private debate: Is this a thing of beauty? An ingenious expression of the human imagination? Or a cop out?”

The last bees form a cloud that fills
the sky. One dies and then
another, little motor of the brain

As I was reading ​Deviation​, Anne Milano Appel’s English translation of Luce D’Eramo’s 1979 novel, I found myself increasingly surprised at the relatively minor position to which Luce D’Eramo and her masterful book have been relegated in the Italian literary canon. The novel is, on the surface level, formally straightforward, consisting of four parts that are each clearly connected to D’Eramo’s biography: her life working in a labor camp as a fervently Fascist volunteer, a political reawakening that leads to her internment in a concentration camp, and ultimately the process of learning how to navigate postwar life in the wake of wartime injuries that left her paralyzed. D’Eramo weaves these episodes together with meditations on memory and self-perception in life-writing as she unpacks the shift from her original Fascist ideology, connected to her bourgeois origins, to the eye-opening experiences of life in the camps.

Kate Atkinson’s inspiration for her latest novel Transcription initially came from a document released by the National Archives detailing the work of a WW2 agent known as “Jack King.” “Jack” was Eric Roberts, an outwardly pedestrian bank clerk who, in secret, worked for MI5 to infiltrate Fascist circles. He had posed as a Gestapo agent during the war, renting an apartment where he would meet regularly with British Fascists and various sympathizers who confided in Roberts with nefarious plots and plans. These meetings were then transcribed into documents over a hundred pages for the records of British intelligence. The technology for recording was not as advanced as it is now; there were, one could imagine, many gaps in the conversation that needed to be filled in.

Barry Cohen is on the lam. Multi-billionaire hedge-fund capitalist, collector of expensive watches, and engineer of the intricate mechanisms that trap him in his tony, Manhattan penthouse life — Barry packs his favorite timepieces into a rollerboard and absconds in the middle of the night. Ditching his credit cards, his wallet, all that ties him to his tremendous wealth, he boards a Greyhound bus headed for a college ex-girlfriend in Richmond, Virginia. Wife Seema is in the rearview, along with their son, Shiva, struggling with seemingly low-functioning autism in a world that barely forgives imperfections. A grain of sand in the clockwork of 1-percenter privilege.

My kneecap is a magnet for mosquitos.
They assemble under the picnic pavilion
And form a small cloud, the shape of a Pierre’s

Join us for an Evening with Columbia Journal at KGB Bar in New York City on October 30, 2018, starting at 7 pm! The reading will feature work from writers who help create the Journal and those who help to guide it, including:

In this interview, the poet Mary Ann Samyn talks about her first encounters with Emily Dickinson’s work, her best advice for writing students, and her new collection, Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance, out now from 42 Miles Press.

Laughing babies all over the wall
The moment you set your eyes on them
after waking up in the morning,

Happy Banned Books Week! Since 1982, this annual event has celebrated books that have been banned from and challenged in schools, bookstores, and libraries. To honor the freedom to read and express ideas, the Columbia Journal staff has compiled a list our favorite banned books. Join the conversation by following the #BannedBooksWeek hashtag on Twitter.

In this interview with MFA candidate Sarah Rosenthal, Nicole Chung talks about confronting family lore surrounding her adoption, discovering revision ideas in her dreams, and editing a memoir while grieving. Chung is the author of the forthcoming memoir All You Can Ever Know, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, GQ, Longreads, and Hazlitt.

In this interview, the poet Bill King talks about his new poetry collection, The Letting Go, what he’s learned from fatherhood, and the importance of sacred spaces for writers.

Why does my body ache
more than ever now
Not just because I am rounding

In this interview, MFA nonfiction candidate Dodie Miller-Gould speaks with writer and Columbia professor Deborah Eisenberg. Eisenberg is the author of Your Duck is My Duck, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins on September 25. Eisenberg’s work is polite but poignant. Her characters are drawn with an intelligence that engages readers.

How does a writer ethically engage with a story of trauma—specifically the trauma of a Syrian refugee family—in his work? How is that task complicated by writing a book for “readers of all ages,” encompassing, in that broad category, children who may not have yet faced the topic of the Syrian refugee crisis? In reading Khaled Hosseini’s latest book, Sea Prayer, we can glean the answers to these questions.

Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, her first book, is a provocative, enlightening, and often depressing piece of nonfiction about women and their anger. Each chapter is thematically oriented and researched to startlingly lucid detail, using a lens through which women and men are compared in order to highlight the savage disparities between the two. These topics range from the bleakly mundane, like workplace relations and domestic labor, to the downright harrowing; a particularly difficult chapter to digest recounts sexual assault cases (many ending in rape and murder), listed one after the other like a morbid shopping list. It may sound off-puttingly clinical, but that’s entirely the point. Chemaly’s voice is research-driven, and impeccably so; allowing the pervasive everyday of gender bias to wash over the reader without their immediate knowledge.

My daughter’s sleep / wave machine
becomes a granular datum of cheer

Lemon Swarm
It is summer’s end, lurid and mutable.
The black pigs graze acorns in semi-freedom.
Perhaps my need to appear

In conversation with Columbia Journal’s Online Poetry Editor Brian Wiora, the poet Richie Hofmann discusses growing up in Germany, reading translated poems, and of course, his poetry. After reading this interview, we hope you will read a selection of his poems, published on the Columbia Journal website.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, the writer Olivia Laing discusses the spaces she works, the one skill that writers need, and the writers she returns to again and again. Her novel Crudo will be released in the U.S. on September 10, 2018.