In Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s first collection of nonfiction writing, she has not reinvented the essay as she innovated the novel in her Outline trilogy—what she has done instead is showcase the pleasurable continuity of a mind at work on the same questions over time. We learn that she is less interested in writing about the self than in the often conflicting roles a self can inhabit—writer, mother, wife, daughter, in her case, or passive listener, teacher, and panelist in the case of Faye, the trilogy’s narrator. She

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care is a chronicle of the cancer Anne Boyer was diagnosed with right after her forty-first birthday. Woven throughout the deeply personal story of her battle with breast cancer—the physical body breaking down in ways that rebel against what society tells us breast cancer should look like—is a social and political critique of the breast cancer “industry.” She calls into question the language we use to describe illness: “A body in mysterious agony exposes itself to medicine hoping to meet a vocabulary with which to speak of suffering in return. If that suffering does not meet sufficient language, those who endure the suffering must come together to invent it.” And more broadly, she persistently scrutinizes the industry that gives us walks for a cure, doctors who decide courses of treatment, companies that create language for the side effects of chemotherapy.

The engulfing panic of losing someone indispensable to you stops time. Needs and emotions are put on hold: hunger, sleep, lust, and ambition are stifled by mourning. From this numbness, how do you kickstart your life? How do you begin to make sense out of death and absence? In Naja Marie Aidt’s new book When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back, Carl’s Book, the author gives us a survival manual. After her twenty-five-year-old son dies unexpectedly, her life is so profoundly affected that even language is obliterated.

Fifteen minutes until visiting hours. Time dragged. Damien was sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the wall, trying to keep it together, waiting. On the other side of the wall, out on the street, people were burning trash. The smoky smell seeped inside the detention center. Damien sat in the corner furthest away from the door, next to the metal bars separating the cell from the people coming and going along the hallway. He was hoping to hide his face by moving to the back, but he knew that it was a pointless effort. Anyone could see him through the bars.

Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites is a book about motive. Monroe notes that though men dominate the world of violent crime—most perpetrators and victims of violent crime are men, she writes, as are most detectives and investigators and criminal attorneys—women make up the bulk of true-crime consumers. Monroe wants to understand why so many women are obsessed with true crime but she is not content with explanations that rely on women’s presumed pragmatism (i.e., that women watch or read true crime in order to avoid becoming victims). Instead, she suspects women find real pleasure in these stories. She writes that “perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.” Note that first-person-plural. Monroe is writing from inside the obsession. She is someone who is prone to what she calls “crime funks,” someone who has always been “murder-minded.” I could include myself in that “we” as well. I’ve seen every episode of Law and Order: SVU, am incredibly susceptible to the inertia of an all-night Forensic Files marathon even as I recognize the familiar beats of these shows, the formless buzz of anxiety that hovers as I take in these stories of assault, murder, and violence. The book, then, sets out to be a personal interrogation as well as a cultural critique, and I suspect that, like me, many readers will come to the book with some first-hand investment in Monroe’s findings.

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.

“Her performances have been enigmas to everyone so far,” says a character in Can Xue’s latest novel, Love in the New Millennium. She is talking about an opera singer, but her words sound just as apt as a descriptor for Can Xue’s experimental fiction: “Her songs aren’t about our past life, or about the emotional life of people today, but instead about the life we have never even imagined.” One of China’s most prominent novelists, Can Xue has called her work “literature of the soul.” Hers is a solo dance in the dark, a metaphysical picture of secular life that operates on its own elusive emotional logic. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation retains much of the zany humor from the Chinese while deftly easing readers into the meanings of names and idioms.

Sarah M. Broom’s debut book The Yellow House reads like a multifaceted map, not just of a place but an expanse of time, marking both relationships and absences. Part scrapbook and part oral history, it is an expertly curated museum exhibit of Broom’s family history. It is also a portrait of New Orleans East across the last 100 years.

Our resident Print Translation Editor Megan Sungyoon chats with Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019) about family, Korean history, and language as a form of resistance and exploration.

“These [essays] are the prisms through which I have come to know myself. In this book, I tried to undo their acts of refraction. I wanted to see the way I would see in a mirror. It’s possible I painted an elaborate mural instead.”

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Emily Bernard about her new book of essays Black is the Body and why she can’t resist the emotional cost of showing her scars. Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxtford American, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and theatlantic.com. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has received fellowships and grants from Yale University, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, and The MacDowell Colony. A contributing editor at The American Scholar, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Unfold, my potato
A bateau ivre full buttermouth for a bottomless breakfast
Brittany crepes and browned fats,

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.

Even the teensiest of curtsies
will make your shadow go away.
If you envision tucking your chin

The bed at the foot of the mountain, I wished it was brighter.
The train, delayed by summons and escarpments.
The fool feasting in the dining car, a child.

Poor drunk and deeply wounded humans
who believe that love cures everything.
And now they usually see that

This is your teacher-creature speaking.
Hello blue jays, twits, and squirrels.
Hello black cat, orange, tabby.

To who,
to you and myself
some identity who tells me I’m doing it wrong

Julian Rosefeldt’s thirteen-part film installation, Manifesto, is situated at the approximate midpoint of the Hirshhorn’s Manifesto: Art x Agency exhibition which comprises the entire outer ring of the museum’s second floor, serving to bridge early twentieth-century manifesto-catalyzed art—futurism, surrealism, constructivism, and lyrical abstraction—with political art that speaks more specifically to contemporary concerns. It thus acts as a synecdoche of the attempt by the exhibition—and by manifestos in general—to taxonomize the breadth of history and the diversity of individual expression. The ways in which the installation subverts these tendencies make the two-hour journey one of the most compelling artistic confrontations in my recent experience, both on intellectual and sensory levels.

Michele Filgate is the kind of person who you can meet for the first time at a co-working space in SoHo, bond over both being indecisive Libras, and feel, because of her kindness and warmth, like you have always known her. Her writing leaves space for a vulnerability that can make you feel like you have always known her, too. In her essay “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,” which inspired Filgate’s anthology of the same name, she writes about her relationship with her mother and abusive stepfather with graceful, precise sentences describing the ways in which trauma looks, feels, and sounds: “Here’s what silence sounds like after he loses his temper. After I, in a moment of bravery, scream back at him: You’re NOT my father. It sounds like an egg cracked once against a porcelain bowl. It sounds like the skin of an orange, peeled away from the fruit. It sounds like a muffled sneeze in church.”