The last time it snowed in Phoenix I was nine and we all still lived together in the big house. In my mind snow was grouped with landscapes like forests and the ocean and with phenomena like the Northern Lights. In Phoenix snow was used as a decoration for Christmas—I remembered cutting tissue paper into snowflakes in second grade, and watching Dad hanging light-up icicles from the eaves of our house like earrings. I think we were both surprised when it snowed—me and my city.

In Crossing, Finnish-Kosovar novelist Pajtim Statovci’s second novel, a queer narrator starts over in every city—sometimes presenting as a man, sometimes as a woman. In each new location 22-year-old Bujar claims a new heritage and a new history. The book opens after Bujar’s unsuccessful suicide attempt in Rome, travelling from place to place, restlessly pulling on and discarding identity after identity—in Germany claiming to be a woman from Bosnia, in New York claiming to be an actor who has acted in small-scale productions all across Europe, in Helsinki claiming to be an immigrant from Italy. He constantly seeks a city in which he can be comfortable, where he can be himself, though what he considers himself to be is sometimes in flux and ambiguous. The one identity he declines to claim is his own: the name Bujar, the life of starvation, deprivation and tragedy in Albania he led and fled ten years ago with his close friend and sometime lover, Agim.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Winners of the Spring Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. Up to three finalists will also be selected and announced in each genre and published on our website, though there is no cash prize. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is February 23rd, 2020. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. More guidelines can be found here.

Tell me about last night
I drank when I hadn’t been drinking so everything felt like a movie
about being sixteen: all those big emotions. The swirl of ice in the glass.

In an alleyway between the Uptown Theater and the Mister Maharashi Indian Restaurant, a cocaine dealer is waiting for a client. Warily, shiftily, he glances up and down the street. Occasionally he looks behind him into the alleyway, which connects to a second alleyway, which in turn connects to a third and a fourth, giving the dealer multiple paths of escape—lines of flight—if police come down the street to catch him. Like a woodchuck, he has left himself many exits from his burrow.

“I never imagined I’d write about boys,” Orenstein writes in her new book Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. Her previous work, Girls & Sex, focused on modern sex and relationships for high school and college-aged young women. Despite this, three years after that book—now against a background of #MeToo, President Donald Trump, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—Orenstein has shed light on the other side of the story. Through a combination of extensive interviews with young men and sociological research, the book seeks to move beyond the space of think pieces written by men and actually include them in the conversation. It gives readers a digestible overview of the problem.

we’re quiet for a moment
don’t sing out loud in pubs
don’t make love in public places

Dear Chanel,

You write that your memoir Know My Name is “an attempt to transform the hurt inside myself, to confront a past, and find a way to live with and incorporate these memories.” This attempt reveals a myriad of fractures in the American judicial system. It also illuminates the reality of rape culture and chronicles your convalescence following a sexual assault by Stanford student Brock Turner that made headlines. I see this book as a reclamation of what the judge and the defense attempted to shut down: your voice. You offer guidance, critique, and analysis but through it all, you weave stunning descriptions, such as those of your home where you “watch the sun spill its yolk over the hills” and “smell the sun baking fallen shards of eucalyptus bark.”

As Ada Calhoun enters her forties, she suddenly finds herself staring at her son’s pet turtle, wondering if it wants something more from life. It sounds silly, but she realizes almost all of her female peers can relate. In Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Calhoun investigates why middle class Generation X American women (defined as those born between 1965 and 1980) are on the verge of “blowing it all up” in a different way from previous generations, haunted by what they did wrong and the versions of themselves that could have been. She writes, “How could women who wanted the challenging job and the financial independence, plus the full home life, still relate to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique?” or in other words, with all they have now, what is still missing?

What do you want people to say at your funeral?
From the comfort of the casket, would you prefer a weeping violin or a cheerful trumpet? And what about the reception—still or champagne? Waterworks or fireworks?

The winter my father’s mother moved out of our home was nothing short of fanged, for where we lived on the Gulf. The roads froze. My father drove us to visit the seniors’ facility after school twice a week, a 10-minute drive away. Her private suite had a little TV deep as it was wide; I could just barely wrap my arms all the way around. While she puttered around her stoveless, ovenless kitchen to fix us styrofoam plates of no-bake cheesecake she’d set in the fridge the night before, we would sit on her sofa and wait for the early-afternoon soap opera programming block to end and the late-afternoon game show programming block to begin.

Perumal Murugan grew up in a family of farmers in Tamil Nadu. He is one of India’s most well-known literary writers, having produced ten novels and five collections each of short stories and poetry. Several of his novels have been translated into English, including Seasons of Palm and Current Show. His best-known novel in the west, One Part Woman, was longlisted for the inaugural National Book Award for Translation. It won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman for writing in Indian languages and the Translation Prize from Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.

We’ve decided to extend the deadline for the 2019 Winter Contest to December 30. We hope this will allow some of you a little extra time to submit. Check out these new interviews with Ottessa Moshfegh, our fiction judge, and Ada Calhoun, our nonfiction judge!

An interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest fiction judge. Conducted by Elliot Alpern, print fiction editor.

An interview with Ada Calhoun, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest nonfiction judge. Conducted by Rachel Keranen, print nonfiction editor.

Recently my colleagues in the English Department made a collective push to compel my getting a cat since, in their generous estimations, cats have shown a remarkable affinity for me and vice versa. It is true cats do appear to gravitate towards my presence in ways my colleagues do not when I visit their homes. I have no rationale for it since I’ve never owned a cat. I also haven’t thought much about acquiring any sort of pet as of late, either, in the midst of finishing my tenure review portfolio this term. In addition, I frequently make any number of the usual excuses for not getting a cat: the expense, the investment of time, the shredding of precious material items, what will happen if the match goes wrong, et cetera. But I don’t admit to them I’m the kind of soft-hearted libertine who enjoys other people’s cats because of my complete lack of responsibility for them, knowing they will return to their owners to commit the rank misdeeds I won’t have to encounter myself. Cuddle benefits, then, with none of the fuss and dander at my place. A solid deal for me, I’d concluded. This self-satisfied mentality of mine likely irritates my colleagues to no end about my resistance more than anything else, among my other notable shortcomings.

Towards the end of her new book Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante reflects on the importance of storytelling: “An individual talent acts like a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition.” This statement could be applied to the work as a whole, a collection of weekly columns the author wrote for The Guardian from January 2018 to January 2019 in response to questions provided by the newspaper’s editors.

In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities?

In the beginning, there were only two. My brother and I, the only children our father would ever have, a man whose face we never saw. We are War and Discord, here long before such titles existed. Long before their wise carpenter gave them a new God to follow. They came and they went, and we outlived them all.

Water-bearer:
constellation of your birth,
Not a womb, but a jar,