‘When I first interviewed a criminal...we talked about The Godfather.’ Dr. Felia Allum knows a bit more about the Italian mafia than most of us. She’s a senior lecturer in Italian and Politics, with a specialism in women and organised crime, and in her role as an academic she has extensively interviewed ex-criminals, law enforcement, and anti-mafia prosecutors for years, which makes her a pretty incredible authority on the topic -- and is also how she ended up screening a mini film-festival all about it.

February 16, 2022 | Wilson Goodwill Industries of the Southern Piedmont will host a grand opening of its newest retail store in Indian Land on Friday, February 25. The new building is located off of Hwy 521 across from the Indian Land Schools and next to the Rec Center that is currently undergoing renovations. The 7,000 square foot building features a donation drive-thru. The store will celebrate its ribbon cutting at 9:45 a.

Photo courtesy of Jake SmithPardon me for feeding into the grim collective unconscious taking over this dirt clod, but I have been really mulling on the music of San Francisco peace-punks Crucifix for the past few weeks. Now, that’s not to say there isn’t a day where the absolute bodaciousness of songs like “Blind Destruction” or “Steelcase Enclosure” don’t cross my mind, because they sure as shit do. Yet, as the apocalyptic visions they caste into my eyes and ears as a middle-schooler become more concrete, I can’t help but squeeze myself deeper into their monstrous sound and find solace in its’ roar.

Just a few days ago, I sent my editor the second draft of my next book, The Infernal Machine, coming out sometime in the spring of 2024. We don’t have a subtitle or a design yet, but we do have a first version of what will probably become the jacket copy, and so I figured you all should be among the very first to read it. The Infernal Machine is a project that I’ve been working on for about four years now, dating back to when I was putting the finishing touches on Enemy Of All Mankind, my account of the pirate Henry Every and the clash between the nascent East India Company and the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb, a conflict triggered by Every’s brutal crimes in the Indian Ocean.

Percival Everett is an experimental novelist and an English professor at the University of Southern California. Erasure is his thirteenth book of fiction. He has bounced from a major New York publisher in 1983, when he was a promising young African American writer, to small houses and university presses, his face glowering from his book covers more unhappily every time. He’s never fit. Often you can’t tell if his characters are black or white.