New Day Tuesday: Why We Came To The City by Kristopher Jansma

“We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died.”

This week’s New Day Tuesday captures the sense of hope and ambition of five twenty-somethings post college—a relentless search to find a purpose, to create something that matters, and to define friendship. Early on we see the main characters can already sense the spirit of why they came to the city weakening.  A poet and Homer scholar, a troubled astronomer, an editor, an investment banker, and Irene Richmond, an enigmatic artist whose battle with cancer, and eventual death, strengthens their bond and forces them examine their friendships and what it means reach for something bigger.

“Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections—if we were all slowly dying—then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.”

Being published today by Penguin Random House, find this book on Amazon,  Barnes & Noble, or your favorite indie bookstore. Also, look out for a story by Jansma in our next print volume, MIGRATION.