In response to the quarantine, The Columbia Review editorial board will share every other day a series of prompts, which we hope will inspire our readers. 1. Think about space. Think about the space that separates you from the computer, the space that separates you from the outside world. How does the space feel that…
Staten Island Stories by Claire Jimenez In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a group of strangers embark on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, telling stories to pass the time—but the text ends before they reach their destination. The pilgrims become connected by their narratives rather than their geography: and, because we never see the pilgrims reach Canterbury,…
I woke up on a Monday with the feelings I get too often: feelings of wrongness and sadness and fear. The one that tells me I am quite alone because such a feeling is too cruel to be human and therefore, I am the only alien on earth who can feel it at all. I…
A Sand Book by Ariana Reines Newly crowned winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the dizzying four hundred-page epic A Sand Book by Ariana Reines masterfully takes on issues of spirituality, consumerism, womanhood, and the occult. Moreover, Reines suggests these themes are conjured by the gross deterioration and obfuscation of language at the hand of the immediacy so latent in the digital economies of the contemporary West. In “A Partial History,” Reines writes of these challenging times: “We were lost in a language of images. / It was growing difficult to speak. Yet talk / Was everywhere.” In turns at…