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During busy times like these, Furlong made most of the deliveries himself, leaving the yardmen to bag up the next orders and cut and split the loads of felled trees the farmers brought in. Through the mornings, the saws and shovels could be heard going hard at it, but when the Angelus bell rang, at noon, the men laid down their tools, washed the black off their hands, and went round to Kehoe's, where they were fed hot dinners with soup, and fish & chips on Fridays.
'The empty sack cannot stand,' Mrs Kehoe liked to say, standing behind her new buffet counter, slicing up the meat and dishing out the veg and mash with her long, metal spoons.
Gladly, the men sat down to thaw out and eat their fill before having a smoke and facing back out into the cold again.
—From Small Things Like These, a short novel by Claire Keegan (Grove Press, 2021). It was first published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Faber & Faber Limited.
I must leave this city today and come to you. My bags are packed and the empty rooms remind me that I should have left a week ago. Musa, my driver, has slept at the security guard’s post every night since last Friday, waiting for me to wake him up at dawn so we can set out on time. But my bags still sit in the living room, gathering dust.
I have given most of what I acquired here—furniture, electronic devices, even house fittings—to the stylists who worked in my salon. So, every night for a week now, I’ve tossed about on this bed without a television to shorten my insomniac hours.
There’s a house waiting for me in Ife, right outside the university where you and I first met. I imagine it now, a house not unlike this one, its many rooms designed to nurture a big family: man, wife and many children. I was supposed to leave a day after my hairdryers were taken down. The plan was to spend a week setting up my new salon and furnishing the house. I wanted my new life in place before seeing you again.
—From Stay with Me, a novel by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Vintage, 2018). The book was originally published in hardcover in Great Britain (Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh) and then in the United States (Alfred A. Knopf) in 2017.
My mother learned to speak English watching these [soap operas], and soon she started practising what she learned. When my father didn't feel like eating, she would ask who he had been eating his meals with that he had no appetite? When a sock went missing from the dryer, she would ask where it went, and when he had no answer, she would accuse him of having an affair.
—From How to Pronounce Knife, a short story collection by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown and Company, 2020). This book won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award, and it was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN America Open Book Award. The segment above is from the story "Edge of the World," which appears on pages 93-105 of the hardcover from Little, Brown in the United States. The collection is also available from McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom.
Once, before [the cancer] got so bad, she took her handbag and left. No one knew where she went. But later they found out that she had taken the 7 line to Main Street, Flushing. Even though I have never met James mother, I can picture her on that day, buying a sponge cake in the gift box and holding it by the ears. She paid the visit to Elder Huang, the optometrist, who is the matchmaker. Afterward, Mr. Huang contacted so-and-so, and so-and-so, until one day in September, Big Mother—which is my father's older brother's wife—came to our Front Gate and cried out: I'm here!
Inside the house, we all ran around. My mother slapped every cushion on the guest sofa. She said, "Leave it, leave it," to our Miss, who was trying to pull off the dry flowers from the butterfly orchid on the glass table. She put Miss in the Back Room with Min-soo so that he would not be under Big Mother's eye-measure. She pushed me to the kitchen. Finally she opened the door as Big Mother came up the steps from the courtyard.
—From "First Language," a short story by Yoon Choi, from her collection Skinship (Knopf, 2021). This story appears on pages 44-79 of the Vintage Books trade paperback edition, 2022. This specific segment appears on page 46.
Bonus book to read again:
When I was a young girl in China, my grandmother told me my mother was a ghost. This did not mean my mother was dead. In those days, a ghost was anything we were forbidden to talk about. So I knew Popo wanted me to forget my mother on purpose, and this is how I came to remember nothing of her. The life that I knew began in the large house in Ningpo with the cold hallways and tall stairs. This was my uncle and auntie's family house, where I lived with Popo and my little brother.
—From The Joy Luck Club, a novel by Amy Tan (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989/Penguin Books, 2016). The section above is from "Scar," which is on pages 33-41 of the Penguin paperback reissued with a preface by Amy Tan in 2019 for the thirtieth anniversary of the book's publication.