‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.
Boy, yaar, they sure called me some good names of late:
e.g. opportunist (dangerous). E.g. full-of-hate,
self-aggrandizing, Satan, self-loathing and shrill,
the type it would clean up the planet to kill.
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‘She must have loved gold seeing that everything in the penthouse was gold. We didn’t sit. Fear didn’t let us see where to sit.’ A story by Adachioma Ezeano.
‘I had also, a week earlier, been fired for trying to sleep with my boss’s husband. I got the idea from a book, or maybe every book.’ A story by Emily Adrian.
‘The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year.’ Katherine Rundell on extinction speculation.
‘Two roof tiles are missing to the rear: the kiss of death. Without repair, ruination is now inevitable. Until then, this is my best hope of shelter.’ Cal Flyn visits the island of Swona in northern Scotland.
‘I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures. / For as long as I can remember my body was a small town nightmare.’ A poem by Ocean Vuong.
‘I grew up kissing books and bread.’
Salman Rushdie defends the act of writing novels.
Blake Morrison interviews Salman Rushdie in 1990, one year after he was placed under fatwa.
‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’
‘You open a book by a writer you’ve never heard of and a new voice leaps off the page and makes you listen.’
‘I'm not quite the same person as the ‘me’ about whom the book is written.’
‘It's like by the time he was born there was too much to know.’
