Though it is not our right to claim that the poets represented in the following portfolio would have remained in dark unfathomed caves of ocean had it not been for The Paris Review, surely all are among those writers whom this magazine has helped make known. For this occasion we invited new work from them. All have made substantial contributions to two or several issues in the past; all seemed to us of a generation that has matured along with this magazine: a generation for the most part younger than that of John Heath-Stubbs or Robert Lowell.
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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