In this amusing story, the experimental author Padgett Powell imagines the schooldays of singer Janis Joplin and her rather weird classmate Charlie Dickens, who speaks in a rarefied language that suggests he might be channelling his 19th-century namesake.

Padgett Powell is an award-winning American author who has become renowned for his innovation and experimentation in both style and content. His novel The Interrogative Mood is a superb example of his work, consisting of nothing but questions.

Read by Jennifer Woodward and Thomas Judd.

Producer: David Roper
A Heavy Entertainment production for BBC Radio 4. Show less