Nevertheless, what's gone is gone. The only regret I had was losing the Motown history. It seemed essential for a book like Middlesex, which contains so much of Detroit. I was born the same year Barry Gordy founded Motown, which is the kind of thing my narrator would have made a lot of. But that will have to wait for another day, another book. I do remember the early days of Motown, when people would go to the Roostertail to see Little Stevie Wonder and the Primettes (that's The Supremes to you.) It's a subject I'd like to del…
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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