I wake up with a Pangea of hives across my torso, stomach more red than white, blanching splotches tendrilling down my legs and up the inside of my arms. They went away over the weekend but are back now, pinpricked Monday night leeching into swollen Tuesday morning. I roll over, announce to my girlfriend Emily that I “definitely have leprosy,” and unpeel the covers to show her. She looks away in horror and I re-sheet myself. I don’t blame her. I’m disgusted too.

The value of art lies in the tale: he explained to me why he must search for the wood out of which he would carve his sculpture. It does not lie in the hands of an artist. It is not found in the chisel he uses nor in the cast to be applied, but in the wood that he chooses. It is not just a simple matter of deciding whether to use the firmness of kamagong or the pliability of batikuling; it is in the story behind the wood. A wood with a story. It must not be just any story as that of wood bought from a lumber mill. The story of how lumber was cut down from the trunk of the oldest trees from national parks and how these were slipped past politicians and soldiers with a little grease.

What is it about beauty that fascinates us, confuses us, shifts our perceptions of the world through memory and intimacy? In Bahar Orang’s new book, Where Things Touch, she begs a similar question, one that should be simple and yet continues to be one of time’s oldest conundrums: what is beauty? Orang’s narrative is one that resists categorization; combining poetry, nonfiction, and philosophy, she brings forth a book that challenges the reader to meditate on the same questions and insights that drove her through the process of writing, searching, and living. This book is not one with answers, but rather, thoughtful questions on what it means to be human, the ways in which aspects of the world remain undefinable, and the overwhelming power of intimacy, memory, and art.

On Wednesday, September 23, 2020 Columbia University, School of the Arts held its finale for “Translating the Future,” a 20-week series of conversations between translators, with “Translating for a World on Fire.” This final event featured Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headley, moderated by Columbia’s very own Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC) director, Susan Bernofsky.

If ever there were a season that needs a do-over, it’s summer 2020. The most expansive and languid of seasons has become stilted and bowed under the pandemic restrictions. There’s the enforced indoor time, the constant bad news, and the de rigueur doom scrolling to take in everything. Into this summer of our discontent comes poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book of essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. Here is everything that’s been missing: family, food, travel, immersion in nature, the abundance of the season, the time to slow down and savor. There’s so much to be dazzled by in the world, Nezhukumatathil reminds us. Pay attention.

li 力
in Chinese,

turned up-
side down

but I drowned. Roman had promised an island, where we could eat coconuts and our spouses would not find us. But open ocean was too far to follow him, so I slipped underwater and did not come back up.

My husband and I currently have a running joke about our son Ethan’s death. Despite Ethan’s best efforts to put distance between him, a teenager who obviously knows everything, and us, his parents who are old fogies, to the point of choosing a college halfway across the country, he’s now stuck with us. Forever. My husband’s plan is for all of us to share the same urn so that Ethan will literally be stuck with us. My plan is to take his urn with us on our travels so we can take family photos at all the tourist traps. I’m currently researching how to travel internationally with an urn. You would think that there’s not a lot of articles on that, but a quick Google search came up with almost 25 million results. I can just picture it—the three of us at the Tower of London, or maybe at Kings Cross Station at platform 9-3/4. We could even use one of the photos as our Christmas card.

Coy best describes Alisson Wood’s relationship with the reader in Being Lolita. Wood cunningly uses the reader’s knowledge so that, at decisive points, they either read with or against the grain of this text. In the preface, Wood narrates her and the teacher’s first kiss. When the teacher kisses the inside of Alisson’s ankle to quell the itch of a mosquito bite, Alisson hadn’t read the novel. At that point, Mr. Nick North, her English teacher, told Alison that the story of Humbert and Lolita is a love story. A reader’s reaction to her admission sets up their relationship with the rest of the memoir. If you know anything about Vladimir Nabokov, you know what Lolita is about.

There was never any question of me leaving. There was no train in the timetable I could take, no car in a garage, not even a bike, and more importantly – now that we’d travelled far enough North – not a single road name on the map that would flag anything in my memory. But that’s not to say I was lost. Our position was always clear; we were a slow-moving pin on the veins of England, and this houseboat that smelled of oiled wood and time, and whose window shutters I’d painted green the day we moved in, was what constituted home now. Its decor of pine-panelled everything was hardly to my taste, but I’d learned to live with it and make my mark with white curtains, houseplants and a sparkling sink. I knew exactly where I was; only the outside kept changing.

The night before I moved from Maryland to California by myself, I went to the ice cream shop with the color changing plastic spoons. I was fourteen. I had always been surrounded by family, having lived in a house with my grandmother, mother, grandfather, brother, and sister.

Romalyn Ante’s debut poetry collection ‘Antiemetic for Homesickness’ illustrates that longing, desire, and need for home. In the poem ‘Memory’, Ante’s speaker uses Tagalog to demonstrate the undeniable claim in longing for a place that is now absent in one’s life. ‘Tahanan means Home, Tahan na means Don’t cry anymore’. Each poem in Romalyn Ante’s book helps navigate the journey in moving from one home and creating another. The poems teeter on the language of two different perspectives, one from birth, which was the Philippines, and one of bombardment that was the United Kingdom, where she now resides. The poems move between English and Tagalog, which speak to Ante’s experience, navigating her own culture and that of the culture she has to present in. There is the Westernized Gaze glaring at Ante, and these poems speak to that fight against assimilation and succumbing to it. Ante’s book also speaks to the people who are left behind in search of a better life. One only has their memories to keep their hope and drive alive to find better opportunities as an immigrant. In the poem, ‘Only Distance’, Ante’s speaker recalls a memory, “When all the stars are out, she returns/ to this tropical wind, to the constellation/ of moles on his shoulder, his second-hand clothes./ He slices mangoes, and lays them on a banana leaf./ She’s with him…”

Tom had picked me up after his soccer game. He was fresh from the shower, his shaggy hair still slightly damp at the edges. He looked so beautiful. It was a Monday evening, three days after we had met. It was the first time we went on a date.

When they enter
my brain the grass
greens past its prime.

In a field, the pollinator dips her instrument into flowers. She is under a white tent almost as large as the field itself—she and the others, all in white from head to toe, with goggles and gloves. The flowers are yellow, black-spotted, and the size of a man’s hand; rows and rows of them unroll into the distance. Eventually, they’ll die, and fruit will come. The fruit isn’t sweet, but bland and filled with seeds and nutrition. She hates it but eats it, like everyone else. No one speaks, though once in a while a throat clears or something electronic beeps or vibrates. Hours go by when she doesn’t think about home, the apartment, her girlfriend. It shouldn’t bother her so much to allow herself to be blank for a while, but she’s bothered.

I am in a mid-sized village in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, studying abroad to learn Spanish. In the middle of my three-week stay, I want to make dinner for my host family. My host mother Doña Margo gives me two options for transforming the gallina into pollo —a sharp twist or a swift and deep slice through the neck. She looks at my hands, reads their inexperience, and tells me to use a knife. The bird is tied by its feet to a branch of the lemon tree, dazed by the rush of blood to its head. The dog knows, waits, eyes fixed on the packed earth beneath the bird.

I once heard there is a pool of loss and each loss adds to it. There’s no differentiating between its objects, especially when there’s no defining what’s been lost. But when it came to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, you knew exactly what was at stake, Grandpa: your family, friends, and country. Your life.

In the early months of the pandemic, an old meme resurfaced on social media: fake plane windows made from household objects – mug handles, washing machine doors, toilet seats – posed in front of a photo of the sky. It had started as a joke about being unable to afford international travel, and became one about being unable to leave the house. The caption: 2020 travel plans be like.

Chen Maoping, known by her pen name Sanmao, was born in 1943 in Chongqing, China. A prolific writer and an ardent traveler, Sanmao lived in Taiwan, the Canary Islands, Central American, and Western Africa. Her life in countries abroad gave birth to over fourteen books, the most well-known of which, Stories of the Sahara, a hybrid of memoir and travelogue, catapulted her into the role of one of the most captivating and enigmatic writers at the time in the Chinese-speaking world.

In the Sonoma dusk, bats swoop above the winding road to our gate and around the garden pond below our bedroom window. I cannot see their faces; only the outline of wings and ears. The bats mostly stay away from me, in their hunt for nighttime insects that cluster in the shadows of the house.