Anna Feuer

Henri Cole describes his own poetry as astringent. His words are stark and piercing—he writes that his forceful style helps him to “persevere each day at my writing table, where I must confront myself, overcome any fear of what I might find there.”

The KGB Bar, true to its name, boasts a Soviet flag at its entrance. Its bright red walls are lined with portraits of mustachioed Russian generals and framed ads for the Daily Worker. Perhaps it was appropriate, then, that the themes tying together the three stories read by Columbia graduate students at KGB last Thursday night were isolation and loneliness.

The latest collection of short stories from Steven Millhauser, CC ’65, fittingly begins with a cartoon. The cartoon, entitled “Cat ’n’ Mouse,” displays what Tom and Jerry would look like as Freudian psychiatric patients.

On January 28, authorities uncovered plots to assassinate Columbia MEALAC professor and Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and his female contemporary, Elif Shafak.

“It’s hot! Ethnic literature’s hot ... You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing!”
That’s what author Nam Le’s friends tell him in “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” an autobiographical short story about Le’s struggle to reconcile with his Vietnamese father. Though initially motivated by the need to write something that would actually sell, Le turned out a story that explores not only life during the Vietnam War but also parental estrangement, feelings of dislocation, and other experiences that transcend ethnicity.