Lawyer Lit: New Fiction From Columbia Law School Alumni
Columbia Law graduates filled a shelf with tales including mystery, tragedy, romance, and poetry.
Not everything law school graduates write begins with a case name. A year-end roundup of alumni fiction includes books designed to entertain, to provoke, and to inspire.
Distinguished debuts: Krystal Anali Vazquez ’19 won the George Garrett Fiction Prize for her novel Lady Without Land (Señorita Sin Tierra), a story the prize judge described as “about family, sex, doubt, and the search for self.” Eunice Hong ’16, director of Columbia Law School’s Davis Polk Leadership Initiative, was awarded the Red Hen Press Fiction Award for her first novel, Memento Mori, which recasts Greek myths through the lens of a Korean American family.
Poignant poetry: Lecturer in Law Menachem Z. Rosensaft ’79, general counsel emeritus to the World Jewish Congress and a longtime leader in Holocaust remembrance activities, has published his second book of poetry, Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (available January 2025). The son of two Auschwitz survivors, Rosensaft imagines the voice of his older brother, Benjamin, who perished in the gas chambers before Menachem was born.
Love lives and family ties: A trio of offerings from best-selling Columbia Law authors includes The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman ’93, about a pharmacist with remarkable remedies and a love interest with naproxen-blue eyes; Jackpot Summer by Elyssa Friedland ’07, in which Powerball wreaks havoc on a family in the midst of selling the family beach house at the Jersey Shore; and Kisses, Codes and Conspiracies from young adult writer Abigail Hing Wen ’04, which kicks off with a magical smooch at prom.
Slightly scary: Death in the Air by Ram Murali ’05 takes place at a luxury Himalayan spa with plenty of murders and a protagonist who is a lawyer by training and a sleuth by circumstance. In the social-political satire Lifers, Keith G. McWalter ’74 imagines the complicated consequences of an artificial genome that extends the human lifespan and a world in which the fear of death is replaced by the challenge of living on and on.
Alumni double-dip: Best-selling author Brad Meltzer ’96 spotlights a fellow alumnus, a member of the Class of 1959, and a Supreme Court justice in I Am Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the latest installment in his children’s book series.
