The Delacorte Review

The Delacorte Review Real True Stories (And How They Happen) The Delacorte Review is the narrative nonfiction publication of the Columbia Journalism School.

New stories appear every month at www.delacortereview.org, and in print four times a year. Its weekly newsletter, Writerland, https://thedelacortereview.substack.com/, is a guide to finding joy in the often difficult work of writing. At the core of The Review's mission is discovery -- of new writers, new voices, new stories, and new readers. We believe that the most powerful stories are the ones writers need to tell. Our commitment is to be home for those stories, and for those writers.

This week we spoke to Jonathan Mahler about his latest , “The Gods of New York”, the story of the city at a pivotal mo...
10/14/2025

This week we spoke to Jonathan Mahler about his latest , “The Gods of New York”, the story of the city at a pivotal moment in its history: the late 1980s.

“There was a challenge that was unique to this book. I was telling the story of the last four years of the 1980s in New York — but of course those years have a particular resonance now because this was the time and place that produced the most significant political actor this country has seen in a generation. So I wanted the book to work on two levels. It had to be totally immersive, which meant that the story needed to be completely contained to New York during these years (no flashing forward). But I also wanted readers to also feel like they were reading the origin story of our current political moment.”

https://tinyurl.com/3tas4w7k

Few literary devices remind me more of the woeful student I was than a front-of-the-book glossary of characters that presumably I am asked to commit to memory before I am granted entry into the story.

What can writers learn from athletes and the pressures they face to deliver? To tackle the same foes, the ubiquity of in...
10/08/2025

What can writers learn from athletes and the pressures they face to deliver? To tackle the same foes, the ubiquity of intrusive thoughts, and turn an emotional vulnerability – imposter syndrome – to their advantage.

“I need to write, to wake up and know that my equivalent of a pitcher waiting to throw a fastball past me is a blank page that I am eager to try to fill.”

I suspect it was not Steven Kwan’s intention to offer advice to writers struggling with fear, anxiety, stress – afflictions so many of us endure.

Inheritances come in many forms, from the stately to the symbolic. Among the least cumbersome, at least in appearance, a...
09/29/2025

Inheritances come in many forms, from the stately to the symbolic. Among the least cumbersome, at least in appearance, are those legacies that come in writing. That is, unless you’ve been entrusted with half a century’s worth of unpublished materials, written by one of the most famous writers in the world. We spoke to Matt Salinger about dealing with all that his father, J.D. Salinger, entrusted to him.

“I would say it’s been close to joyful, despite it being grueling, because it’s kept him alive for me. I miss his voice tremendously. I miss his sort of contrarian, rock-solid views of the world. I could always depend on him to have a really frank, interesting, and usually wise take on things, and I miss that. But I’m finding it everywhere I look in the material that he left behind, unpublished.”

Inheritances come in many forms, from the stately to the symbolic, along with every shape of heirloom that accumulates over a lifetime –I’m thinking of a relative’s vast collection of ceramic frogs.

This week, Besha Roddel tells us about her new book "Hunger Like a Thirst," a memoir and a history of why food has come ...
09/27/2025

This week, Besha Roddel tells us about her new book "Hunger Like a Thirst," a memoir and a history of why food has come to matter emotionally and culturally.

"Food writing is especially transportative for lots of reasons…the taste of things transports us in a way that even visual memories (or art or photos) can't, just for biological reasons. It also works because it's quotidian – everyone eats.”

There are stories writers should write, typically when an employer or editor promising a pay day wants them.

Writers are vexed for reasons so familiar that there is little need to enumerate them. But one vexation stands apart bec...
09/18/2025

Writers are vexed for reasons so familiar that there is little need to enumerate them. But one vexation stands apart because it feels so painful and haunting: regret. This week, a reader writes about “so many professional goals missed, all those potential stories untold”. Yet to return to writing, the same question reappears and again: what do you want from it in the first place?

Writers are vexed for reasons so familiar that there is little need to enumerate them.

The struggle to write is not limited to the young. With the years come more skills with which we can better do our work....
09/11/2025

The struggle to write is not limited to the young. With the years come more skills with which we can better do our work. But those skills do not always prepare us for stories that, on the surface, look familiar but that can be altogether new, unsettling, and sometimes frightening.

This week, a homage to departed journalist Paul Colford, and the story it took him decades to return to.

“Time had sanded away the four-foot bluff and left a long, manageable slope to the water’s edge, now mere inches off. When I turned around at this spot, I could see again the doctor and the cops emerging from the growth, finding us too late to matter.”

It's good to be back. It is also good to have had what all writers need but which we too seldom are allowed, or allow ourselves: time to step away and hopefully see our work more clearly and fully.

Reporters develop all sorts of connections with subjects, every hue of interaction. In a profession hard-wired to be dub...
06/02/2025

Reporters develop all sorts of connections with subjects, every hue of interaction. In a profession hard-wired to be dubious, it is not always easy to see the best in people. But sometimes we meet someone whose unique goodness stays with us. This is a homage to such a person.

My students have graduated and dispersed and I am kicking myself for sending them off without telling them about one of the most profound experiences that awaits them: that if they do their work right and remain open, they may well meet – loved ones aside – the best, most honorable, most generou...

“Places read and places traveled accumulate over time, and continue to change with experience. Each is a fraction of the...
05/23/2025

“Places read and places traveled accumulate over time, and continue to change with experience. Each is a fraction of the ongoing genealogy of where we’ve been or dreamt of going, some of it faded and some indelible, leaving a strata of sorts.”

Whether research, a companion to travel, or a pilgrimage, the intersection of place and page can be enriching and tell us how and why we read. In this new chapter of Writerland, we delve into some notable examples:

A series of winding roads through the mountains descended into a canyon, with a river running along its bottom.

There is nothing new in writers holding fast to their conclusions, but that inclination toward certainty feels so much m...
05/21/2025

There is nothing new in writers holding fast to their conclusions, but that inclination toward certainty feels so much more a part of our culture. We know what we know and as a result we end up doing too little asking, too little second guessing. This piece describes what feels counter-intuitive for this moment: the delight in being humbled, in being reminded that there is always, always more to learn.

An anxious email landed in my inbox the day after my students’ book went on sale earlier this week.

Fresh off the press: Fourteen writers uncover the hidden lives behind old photographs: a son battling for a mother's lov...
05/19/2025

Fresh off the press: Fourteen writers uncover the hidden lives behind old photographs: a son battling for a mother's love in a family of thirteen; teenagers forced to grow up too soon; a Chinese-American descendant chasing lost family histories; a young woman discovering the heartbreak behind her father's fading memories. From long-buried secrets to quiet triumphs, each story reveals how photographs can capture more than a moment — they can hold the untold struggles, dreams, and fragile connections that define who we are.

By turns raw, tender, and unforgettable, Piece by Piece invites readers to see how the smallest image can unlock an entire world.

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The time between stories can be as unsettling as the time between romances. A love story ends and before another begins ...
05/15/2025

The time between stories can be as unsettling as the time between romances. A love story ends and before another begins you wonder and worry whether you will ever find joy again.

We find ourselves needing to start over, each time with the knowledge of what will await us.

So, how do writers deal with the time between stories and the void on the page? Here are some of their answers.

And so you have written.

Something gets lost when students from abroad come to America and learn to write as journalists here: the voices they ca...
04/29/2025

Something gets lost when students from abroad come to America and learn to write as journalists here: the voices they carry with them. Imagine landing here with all your bags and ideas of what stories are supposed to sound like, only to be told that you might have left those traditions and sensibilities behind. Here they explain how they see their work, and how where they grew up and the languages they spoke shaped them.

Something gets lost when students from abroad come to America and learn to write as journalists here: the voices they carry with them.

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Our Story

Stories do not write themselves, much as writers may modestly insist they do. Stories exist because writers need to tell them—a need so deep that they will endure false starts, woeful sentences, dead-end paragraphs, two-dimensional characters, flabby prose, wrong turns, and shaky narratives. In short, they will risk all the things that, taken together, comprise the writer’s greatest fear: failure. Specifically, failing to tell the story they need to tell.

Still, they persist. If the best fiction is propelled by imagination, we believe that the best narrative nonfiction is propelled by the relentless and often-lonely business of finding out things that are often maddeningly difficult to find. In a word: reporting. Nonfiction storytelling can be as compelling, riveting, and transporting as fiction—so long as you come back, as they say, with the goods.

Our mission is discovery, and it comes in two parts: First, for our readers to discover new, original works of ambitious narrative nonfiction, often by writers they are reading for the first time. And second: allowing our readers to discover how those stories came to be told. And why a writer needed to tell it. http://www.twitter.com/delacortereview http://www.delacortereview.com