On his twenty-ninth birthday, Baby Williams gave a party for two or three thousand in the New Orleans Superdome. Baby and his older brother Slim ran Cash Money, the hottest rap label in the city, and they liked to live large.
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‘It’s no good joining an existing cult, you have to start one yourself.’
A short story by Japanese author Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, who also brought us Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings.
‘The oysters were her idea, a way of catching me off guard. I accidentally said yes.’
A story by Amy Silverberg.
‘I often had head lice as a child.’
Memoir by A.K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches.
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
On love, its absence and Joni Mitchell’s Blue album.
‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’
Nick Laird’s elegy for his father, Alastair Laird, who died of Covid-19.
‘Across the river, in a Catholic enclave in the Waterside district, there was a disused funeral home in which, three nights a week, at 6d a shot, contraband teen movies could be sat through and sometimes seen, according to the state of the projector.’
‘I ask my wife what she means by kidnap exactly, but she says never mind’.
‘In every other respect – colour, country, creed – these people might have nothing in common. Some were convicted criminals, others sought political asylum, still others had overstayed their visas or were accused of Green Card frauds, and a few might even be mistakes, the victims of computer or human error. But this one bond was absolute.’
‘My life as a writer depends on irony and metaphor, and my parents are horrified and alienated by both.’
Translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris.
A Kenyan journalist falls in love with the Tizita, popularly called Ethiopian blues, in this extract from Mũkoma Wa Ngũgĩ’s new novel.
‘When I was 4 or 5 I sent the Queen of England drawings of monsters.’
