Discerning readers of this issue will note that once again we have focused on a single topic—screenwriting in this case. It is the second time we have done a “theme” issue, last fall’s number being entirely devoted to humor—poems, short stories, interviews, commentaries. Obviously, such a comprehensive offering is impossible with screenwriting — hardly a subject to be tackled by poets or short-story writers. Nonetheless, the three interviews (with Richard Price, Billy Wilder and John Gregory Dunne) are applicable, and so is the new feature, “The Man in the Back Row Has a Question.” As is a feature on Truman Capote’s work as a screenwriter of Beat the Devil. Lastly, a number of pages have been set aside for a portfolio on the work of the late Terry Southern — a screenwriter of first rank (Easy Rider, Dr. Strangelove, The Cincinnati Kid) as well as a distinguished novelist and short-story writer (Red Dirt Marijuana, The Magic Christian, Texas Summers). He was a longtime friend of this ma…
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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