The interest in the feature entitled “China: Literary Happenings,” which appeared in the last issue of The Paris Review, has been such that the magazine has asked Timothy Tung, who collected the material, to put additional questions to Dong Leshan whose short story, "The Topsy-Turvy World of Professor Fu,” was featured. Dong, who is a visiting scholar at Cornell University, had been asked a number of questions about his story and the current state of writing and publishing in today’s China. What follows is an extension to those remarks.
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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