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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Ariel Saramandi on her experience teaching in a lycée in Mauritius.
Fiction by Sidik Fofana, set in the South.
Kevin Maxwell on the police in the UK.
Morgan Parker and Rachel Long in conversation.
Poetry by Danez Smith, author of Don't Call Us Dead.
‘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.’
‘They’d practiced it ont bus into town: to mek sure Kel gorrin, they’d go past bouncer together, talking reyt loud about periods, so he wouldn’t even bother asking Kel her date of birth.’
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’
