isn’t really a tower. It’s a square
building with towers at each
of the four corners. In the thirties
they made a movie of it starring Boris Karloff
as Mord the executioner, who dabbled in torture.
A busy man was Mord. his boss, Richard the Third,
was demanding. Richard had no hump
on his back, but Boris had a club foot,
as though to make up for it. Richard drowned
the Duke of Clarence, whose name wasn’t Clarence,
in a tub of malmsey, a sweet-tasting wine.
Clarence had stood in his way. Richard
was determined to kill all who stood in his way,
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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