“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.

i want
to reply
about it all

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.

T. Fleischmann’s essay, Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through, is a balancing act of various genres. It’s non-fiction piled on top of an art critique balanced on photographs and spun around by poetry. The narrative, however, keeps a consistent thread of hunger and searching that is never frustrating and always disarming. The author’s quest to assert their existence and their right to belong brushes against questions of love and loss, violence and courage, gender and sexuality, art and perception.

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?

In this interview, MFA candidate Jai Hamid Bashir talks with Ross Gay about his new nonfiction book, The Book of Delights. Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

A notable achievement in contemporary Spanish artistic output, Nocilla Trilogy, by Augustin Fernández Mallo, is a beguiling, humorous, and challenging collection which explores the role of writing in the 21st century. With splintered narratives threaded through hundreds of chapters of varying length—from a few sentences to over eighty pages—Fernandez Mallo illustrates his thoughtful aesthetic strategy, fueled by an epistemological urgency, to shape contemporary approaches to literature in the information age.

Welcome to Blurbed, a round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed features a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), for which she won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017 and won the Whiting Award in 2018. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang. Here, she talks with MFA candidate Audrey Deng about cultural stigmas around mental illness, “narrative therapy,” and academia.

Territory of Light chronicles the year-long journey of a mother and her daughter navigating a newly disorienting world in the wake of her husband’s swift and painful exit from their lives. Throughout these closely linked twelve stories, the reader intimately observes the family’s crushing experiences of anger, resentment, detachment, and desolation, transforming their relationships and, inevitably, their lives.

“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.

Staring at these bones

in the utter rhythm of sun

they seem inevitable,

but only might have been.

It Is Too Late Now

Look at the map, the clock and the calendar.

It is too late!

Here is the crux of the matter!

This is the hour to go our separate ways.

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.

On the night of January 17th, the Brooklyn Museum coupled a tour of Do Ho Suh’s installation The Perfect Home II with a literary salon on Go Home!, a collection of works by Asian American writers on the impossibility of “going home.” Suh’s translucent fabric apartment, hand-stitched with chalk pink manatee blue, and faint jade nylon, glowed beneath the dome ceiling of the museum. The installation is a hauntingly precise 1:1 replica of his former home on 348 West 22nd St. Suh, one of South Korea’s most famous contemporary artists, is internationally renowned for these immersive, life-size installations of fabric houses. One: Do Ho Suh is his second major exhibition in the East Coast, following Almost Home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum last summer.

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.

Put simply, the wanting was for one thing only:
to plant a seed. To bear fruit. Never mind
the world was ending. I closed my eyes

These translations of avant-garde Iranian modernist Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) have been co-translated from Farsi by Rebecca Ruth Gould and the Iranian poet Kayvan Tahmasebian and have been drawn from their forthcoming project, available here.

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.