Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and her story ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ from Granta 115: The F Word.
Photograph by Chris Boland
‘I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it.’
Amy Key on Joni Mitchell’s seminal album, released fifty years ago in 1971.
‘My work life – like, maybe, yours – is built around another, non-paying vocation.’
Hilary Plum on listening to the Swet Shop Boys while (not) working.
‘The highs and lows of fame, have been far better and far worse than both mother and daughter could have hoped for.’
Fiction by Alexia Arthurs, inspired by Rihanna.
‘Only M.I.A. could juxtapose the tropes of bad diaspora poetry against the horrors of interrogation techniques and get away with it. For a while, at least. ’
Momtaza Mehri on M.I.A.
First published in Granta 76: Music, an essay by Greil Marcus on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which inspired the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan.
‘My lover Picasso is going through her Blue Period. In the past her periods have always been red.’
‘You were a coat of many colours wrestled into the dirt.’
‘We all knew that about the gods – that they were total sex.’
‘This never made sense to Roxanne, whose whole life was a treat.’
Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches.
