After a while, we stopped counting the dead
and let the body of the wind push us into departure.
Nothing civil about war, everything numb with distance.

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.

“Our mothers are our first homes,” writes Michele Filgate in the title essay of a new collection she edited, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence. The mother’s body is also the site of the first tragedy, the instant when we are torn from the nurturing safety of the womb and sent into the loneliness that we will never escape. It is no wonder that the image of the mother resonates throughout history with both pleasure and pain, with love and longing. It is no wonder that this collection of essays about mother-child relationships, written by contemporary authors who are diverse in age and race, gender and sexual orientation, socio-economic status and writing style, can touch every reader.

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.

When the shadow of the earth fell on the moon it was red like the cherry you left on my neck— which is another way of saying it seemed to turned purple with the night and brought with it tears from blinking against the wind—which is another way of saying it was cold like the tiles we laid down on in the Carl Andre exhibit—which is another way of saying we joined the dark spot of a fluorescent world waiting for the white walls to fall—which is another way of saying we were surprised when security laughed and said yeah, they do that too—which is another way of saying our violation was unoriginal and could be called customary—which is another way of saying the 144 magnesium square tiles had a similar energy to the wrestling mat at your high school—which is another way of saying we are still on our backs looking up and waiting for God or a referee to call the match—which is another way of saying it was a draw and we left the museum in something of a daze—which is another way of saying we felt suspended like astronauts—which is another way of saying our blood wasn’t where it should to be.

There are many Frida Kahlos inside the Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. There is a diminutive Asian girl with a crown of braids, dressed in a long red skirt and embroidered blouse. There is a tall blond man with fine penciled unibrow, a headband with enormous flowers, red kitten heels. Kahlo stretches across T-shirts of little girls on tiptoes, across bags, phone cases, the red painted lips of gallery-goers and the flowers in their hair.

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.

These poems first appeared in Anna Glazova’s collection For the Shrew, which won the oldest independent literature award in Russia, the Andrey Bely Prize, in 2013. They have been translated from Russian by Alex Niemi.

When I arrived at Mr. John Gruen’s the following day he was not standing at the top of the stairs as I thought he might be. Instead, when I turned the corner, he was in the entranceway to their apartment. His hand was raised well above his head, his extended fingers paralleling the climb of the doorframe, and from his wrist to his crisscrossing feet his torso and bending legs nearly formed a parabola that defied some sort of mathematical logic. As I moved towards him his head bent in the opposite direction.

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.

To my younger self, how wrong you were then
to mistake your hours for waiting,
suspicious the days were only hand motions, shopping bags,

A lot has changed for Louis Fratino in the past year, and his autobiographical paintings are a case in point. In Come Softly to Me, the twenty-five-year-old artist’s second solo show in New York and first at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Fratino’s work has absorbed the City, where he settled after a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Berlin. In “Me,” we see the Chrysler building reflected in his pupils; in “The Williamsburg Bridge,” we see him walking alone along the waterfront, the horizon on fire. Cocteau- and Matisse-inspired male odalisques lounge nude beside open windows, and same-sex couples embrace on dance floors, club-lit as if inside an ultramarine and cadmium-red kaleidoscope.

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.

“It’s better for a star to never be around,” says Rikio Mizuno, the narrator of Yukio Mishima’s 1961 short novel Star (recently translated by Sam Bett for New Directions Press). “Absence is his forte,” he concludes. At twenty-four years old, Rikio has reached the height of his movie acting career. Young fans surround him on set. They idolize him, dress like him, mirror him. He finds them all disgusting, though he cannot find himself, despite appearing everywhere from press releases to the life-sized posters he plasters to the outside of his bedroom door. Celebrity has taken over his life. The entertainment bosses who hire and direct him have, in collaboration with the endless fans, agreed on who and what is: a bad-boy yakuza on screen, who in reality is an innocent heartthrob. His public life is controlled by this latter narrative, such that even when musing out loud about suicide, his assistant instructs him to make sure it looks like an accident if ever he decides to go through with it. An innocent heartthrob, after all, loves life, and never thinks of leaving this world.

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 pastor spoke of a savior, sins, end of times as they raised their open hands towards the sky with their eyes closed, towards a heaven of clouds and oxygen. I accepted Maeve’s invitation to the Evangelical service that took place every Saturday night in her neighborhood. We both walked from her house to her church while the grasshoppers called a looming night. The church was more the veranda of a small-cemented house with ceramic floors coated by a thin veil of dust. The windows creaked and spilled rust all around us when the pastor closed them. Plastic white chairs filled the room—those very same Dominican men sat on to play dominos inside sweaty colmados. An ailing man knelt at the center wearing a faded blue shirt with holes while the pastor held the crown of his head and cast out his risk of heart attack. The man looked up towards the sky until his eyes became two white stones and his body trembled as if struck by lightning.

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.

Suppose I start a cult. Suppose I bet a son.
Suppose where the world ends my body begins,
Wombed away, waiting while Mother witches drug runs,

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural 2019 Spring Contest, which was judged by Alexandra Kleeman, Tommy Pico, and Kiese Laymon. We want to thank everyone who entered the Contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three 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.

“Is it normal to be ashamed of loving?” asks Édouard Louis in his third intensely autobiographical novel, Who Killed My Father. This searing short work, with its conspicuously declarative title, turns around questions that aren’t quite questions, and answers that are bold politically driven accusations. It opens with the speaker—who, as we know from interviews, is Louis himself—paying a visit to his father in the northern French village of his childhood after several years of separation. Yes, his father is still alive, but Louis argues that a lifetime of poverty, manual labor, malnourishment, and lack of education condemned him to an early death at barely 50 years old. Using fragments and scenes, Louis sketches an urgent, yet intimate, portrait of his father, who we learn is the “you” throughout the book. The detail is excruciating: His belly has been “torn apart by its own weight” and his heart “can’t beat without assistance, without the help of a machine. It doesn’t want to.”