His eyes dart through a physical-asset
inventory; he asks, was I wondering,
as he gestures to the contents of his cart,
about his expanded tastes, apparently
each product reminds him of a country
he and his new wife (she too busy to work
for wages) have seen—and so on and so far
from our first trip to France, then new to travel
though after only one year already old
to each other, to Paris and my falling
in love with and knowing I was loved by
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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