Podd: The Shakespeare and Company Interview

BONUS: Lauren Elkin on Scaffolding (in conversation with Amanda Dennis)

13 november 2024 | 60 min

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood… Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space.

A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.

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Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.

Born in Philadelphia, Amanda Dennis studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Colombe Schneck on The Paris Trilogy (with Translator Natasha Lehrer)

6 november 2024 | 56 min

Lynne Tillman on American History, Human Absurdity, and why Trump should have become a Comedian

23 oktober 2024 | 69 min

A woman speaks to us from her room in a residential home, of some description. She reflects on her life, her family, her pets, on time—the past, present and the future—on Manson Family Alumnus Leslie Van Houyten, on History, on Death, on the Occult, on what it means to be “sensitive”…and so much more besides. All the while she is distracted, bothered, grounded, and charmed by her fellow residents, a rag-tag slice of American life if ever a novel saw oner. As you can imagine from a Lynne Tillman book—indeed, as you would hope—things get discursive, things get disrupted, things get WEIRD, very quickly. First published in 2006, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY achieves the eerie feat of growing more pertinent as time goes on. Deeply aware of the tradition of the novel—perhaps the American novel in particular—Tillman is also confident enough in the newness of her project, and mischievous enough in her approach, to subvert that tradition almost to breaking point. To echo the words of George Saunders, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY is “beautiful, sacred, insane.”

Buy American Genius, A Comedy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/american-genius

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Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy; and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame Realism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Ayşegül Savaş on Love, Rootlessness, and “The Age of Poetry”

9 oktober 2024 | 56 min

On the State of the (Book)World, with Lauren Groff and Neel Mukherjee (live in Edinburgh)

25 september 2024 | 61 min

For this special episode, recorded live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Adam Biles was joined by novelists Lauren Groff and Neel Mukherjee for a wide-ranging discussion that takes the temperature (and the pulse!) of the book industry, from bookshops, to publishers, to prizes, to festivals... Enjoy!

Buy The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-shakespeare-and-company-book-of-interviews

Buy The Vaster Wilds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-vaster-wilds-3

Buy Choice: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/choice-2

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Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and

Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Neel Mukherjee won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010 for his debut novel A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. His novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and heralded as 'Stunning ... a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today' (NPR). Choice, a novel as triptych, is his latest book.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Rachel Kushner on Creation Lake (Booker Prize SHORTLIST 2024)

11 september 2024 | 55 min

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake is a spy novel stacked with ideas. As our fast-thinking, gun-packing protagonist wends her way down to the south of France, charged—by forces unknown—with infiltrating and sowing chaos at a commune of eco-warriors, her mission leads her into exhilarating reflections on activism, on charisma, on neanderthals and other lost races of archaic humans, on the remodelling—some might say devastation—of rural France in the name of progress, on loss in its myriad forms, on the shadows loss leaves behind, on Guy Debord, on the apparently charmed life of Louis Ferdinand Céline, on Daft Punk’s ubiquitous Get Lucky, on space, on time, on spacetime, and on the many paths she has and hasn’t taken in her life… As that list hopefully demonstrates, the scope of Creation Lake is vast, stretching from the micro of the personal to the macro of the cosmos—and touching on everything in between. And yet incredibly, Creation Lake never feels weighed down by all this. Quite the opposite. It hurls forward at exactly the dizzying speed you’d expect from the wise-cracking secret agent at its heart. All in all, Creation Lake is quite the ride. Recorded in Paris in March 2024.

Buy Creation Lake: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/creation-lake-3

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Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, as well as a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K. Her new book, THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020 will be published in April 2021. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Ferdia Lennon on Glorious Exploits

4 september 2024 | 42 min

Our guest in the writer’s studio this week is Ferdia Lennon, whose debut novel Glorious Exploits depicts the ancient world in a way readers will never have experienced it before. Set in Syracuse in 412 BC, after the catastrophic attempt by Athens to invade the city, Lampo and Gelon, two out-of-work potters, have the harebrained idea of staging a production of Medea—perhaps the greatest play, by unquestionably the greatest playwright of their time—using, as actors, the Athenian soldiers held as prisoners in the quarry. And if that premise weren’t intriguing enough on it’s own, it’s the writer’s execution that really sets Glorious Exploits apart, as Lennon eschews the stilted formality that tales of Antiquity often lapse into, in favour of an always lively, frequently fruity, distinctly Irish vernacular. Glorious Exploits is a story about friendship, about art, about love, and about violence. It’s also a story about stories—those we tell each other, those we tell ourselves, and the power they have to spirit us to other worlds entirely.

Buy Glorious Exploits: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/glorious-exploits

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Ferdia Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and Libyan father. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. His short stories have appeared in publications such as the Irish Times and the Stinging Fly. In 2019 and 2021, he received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Roxy Dunn on As Young As This

28 augusti 2024 | 38 min

Poetry: Ishion Hutchinson reads from and discusses School of Instructions

21 augusti 2024 | 48 min

School of Instructions, the latest work by Ishion Hutchinson, draws from the time he spent in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, to foreground the experience—brutal, significant, but long overlooked—of West Indian volunteers in the First World War. This book length poem is a sensorial voyage into the convoys, garrisons and trenches of the Middle Eastern war theatre in all its monstrousness and disorientation, in which Ishion Hutchinson masterfully deploys his immense gift for spiriting vivid, textured, and living images from the page. The poem also juxtaposes the horror of war with the life of Godspeed, an ordinary—by which I mean mischievous and sweet-natured—boy growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. And it is perhaps this interweaving of narratives, of epochs, of worlds, of the micro and the macro, that makes School of Instructions not just a significant work of poetry, but also an important act of historical empathy, reaching back more than a century to highlight how the ossified remains of empire continue to distort the lives of the people of once colonised lands. School of Instructions—which was shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize—is a profound, affecting book, quite unlike any other work of poetry.

Buy School of Instructions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/school-of-instructions

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Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among honors.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Get bonus content on Patreon

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Michael Donkor on Grow Where They Fall

14 augusti 2024 | 61 min

This week’s guest is Michael Donkor whose new novel Grow Where They Fall is a meticulous and tender exploration of two formative moments in the life of one Kwame Akromah, twenty years apart. Kwame is Black, Gay, British of Ghanian descent, a dedicated teacher, a dependable friend—character traits and conditions of life that weave around each other and interact, with unpredictable results—whether for the ten-year old boy or the grown man—at times lifting Kwame up, at other times dragging him down. Grow Where They Fall manages to be as gentle as it is spirited, as moving as is fun to read, and Donkor handles the changing register of life, and of London, in these different decades, with skill and verve. It is a book not just about growing up, and perhaps growing old, but also, in a sense, about growing out — growing out of the roles handed down to us by our families, growing out of friendships, growing out of jobs, and growing out of our own fixed ideas about ourselves. It’s also a book which asks the essential human question: Is it ever really possible to know where we are going without first knowing where we have come from?

Buy Grow Where They Fall: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/grow-where-they-fall

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Michael Donkor was born in London in 1985. He was raised in a Ghanaian household where talking lots and reading lots were vigorously encouraged. Michael read English at Oxford where he developed a particular interest in the works of Woolf, Lessing and Achebe, and later undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Michael worked in publishing for a number of years, but eventually decided to put his literary enthusiasms to other uses: in 2010, he retrained as an English teacher, teaching A-Level students, trying to develop a curious excitement about books and storytelling within his students. He now lives in Portugal, where he works as a bookseller. In 2014 Michael was selected by Writers Centre Norwich for their Inspires Mentoring Scheme, and worked with mentor Daniel Hahn. His first novel, HOLD, which explores Ghanaian heritage and questions surrounding sexuality, identity and sacrifice, was published by 4th Estate in 2018, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prizes. Michael was also selected by Scottish Poet Laureate Jackie Kay as one of the most important contemporary British BAME authors. He has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, BBC Radio 3, the TLS and the Independent.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Get bonus content on Patreon

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Writing Against Normality, with Samanta Schweblin

7 augusti 2024 | 63 min

Parenting in the age of AI, with Helen Phillips

31 juli 2024 | 53 min

So much has been written about the imminent transformation that Artificial Intelligence will bring to our world. But it is often hard to get much of a sense of what that will mean on a personal level—for our work, for our leisure and, perhaps most importantly of all, for our families. What improvements will result? What new tensions will arise? What devastation will be wrought? In HUM, Helen Phillips takes these questions and masterfully dramatises them in the lives of a financially struggling family of four. As we spend time with mother May, father Jem, and kids Lu and Cy, we not only experience the very real, very claustrophobic presence of this invasive, dehumanising technology, but are also forced to reckon with the truly thorny question of whether some of the gifts it offers—foremost among them reassurance concerning the wellbeing of those we love—are a worthy altar upon which to sacrifice…well, pretty everything else. Just as with her much celebrated 2019 novel THE NEED, in HUM Helen Phillips has once again used the lens of deeply compelling speculative fiction to help us better understand the world as it changes around us.

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Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including the novel The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019; Chatto & Windus, 2019), which was long-listed for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. Her novel HUM is forthcoming in August 2024 (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books).

Helen's short story collection Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016) received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) was named a notable collection by The Story Prize and was re-released in 2023. She is also the author of the children’s eco-adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012).

Helen has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, and the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award.

Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times, among others. Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, and Spanish.

A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson, their children, and their dog.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Get bonus content on Patreon

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Creating Life from Art, with Catherine Lacey

24 juli 2024 | 58 min

Paul Murray on The Bee Sting

17 juli 2024 | 66 min

Set in small-town, post-crash Ireland, The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family—Dickie, Imelda, Cass and PJ—as the fabric of their lives first frays at the edges, then begins to unravel completely. The Barnes’ are endearing, and complex, and funny, and infuriating… In short, one of the most realistic and memorable portrayals of a family you’ll find in contemporary fiction.

Throughout the book The Bee Sting’s focus masterfully expands and contracts between the minutiae of adolescent friendship, marital tensions and financial woes, and the threat of full scale global apocalypse, while touching on pretty much everything in between.

It is a book about families, how they build you up and how they knock you down, about how both the lived past and the imagined future weigh on our lives, about coincidence, about loneliness, about optimism, about love and loss, about climate change, and about shame… it’s also a book, unsurprisingly, about bees—although perhaps not in the way that you might think.

Buy The Bee Sting: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-bee-sting-3

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Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975 and is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, The Mark and the Void and The Bee Sting. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void won the Everyman Wodehouse Prize. The Bee Sting won the Nero Book of the Year Award and the An Post Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Writers’ Prize for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Paul Murray lives in Dublin.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Get bonus content on Patreon

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Claire Kilroy on Parenting under the Patriarchy

3 juli 2024 | 55 min

Rachel Cusk on Art, Violence and Freedom through Destruction

19 juni 2024 | 60 min

When Radical Art meets Obscene Wealth, with Hari Kunzru

5 juni 2024 | 57 min

Sheila Heti on Alphabetical Diaries

23 maj 2024 | 50 min

BONUS: Celebrating Dylan Thomas with Cerys Matthews…with exclusive live music from Flora Hibberd!

16 maj 2024 | 57 min

To celebrate Dylan Thomas Day 2024 we’re delighted to share this recording of our recent event with award-winning songwriter, author and broadcaster Cerys Matthews. The evening also featured live music from Flora Hibberd and her band, including a brand new song composed for this evening. Enjoy!

Viet Thanh Nguyen on Memory, Migration and Model Minorities

8 maj 2024 | 63 min

A few weeks ago, we welcomed Pulitzer Prizewinner Viet Thanh Nguyen to Shakespeare and Company to discuss his engrossing new work A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, a book about family, and memory, and storytelling, and history, on all the levels that it impacts upon a life.

Buy A Man of Two Faces here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-man-of-two-faces

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The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide

With insight, humour, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thu?t and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn M?i, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.

Resonant in its emotions and clear in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Photo by Hugo Clair Torregrosa (c) Shakespeare and Company Paris

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Ottessa Moshfegh on bringing Eileen to the screen

24 april 2024 | 62 min

Percival Everett on James, his subversive reimagining of Huckleberry Finn

10 april 2024 | 35 min

James—the new novel by Percival Everett—retells, reframes, and reimagines Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the black man whose flight from slavery quickly entangles with the journey of Huck, on the run after faking his own death to escape his violent father. James gives us the events of Twain’s picaresque from a vital new standpoint—opening up previously unexplored plains of character consciousness as it does so—expanding and subverting the original story. And the novel doesn’t just fill in the blanks about Jim’s movements when our protagonists are separated, but also wrests the narrative arc itself in new and astonishing directions.

Buy James here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/james-4

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The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .

From the shadows of Huck Finn’s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.

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Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Get bonus content on Patreon

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On Allen Ginsberg: His life, his work and his archives, with Pat Thomas and Peter Hale

27 mars 2024 | 40 min

We were joined by countercultural historian Pat Thomas, and Peter Hale, manager of the Ginsberg estate, and discover their new collaboration Material Wealth Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg.

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A prolific poet, raconteur, activist, and thinker, Allen Ginsberg was also a prolific collector, meticulously saving letters, postcards, draft notes and manuscripts, photographs and snapshots, appearance bills and rally broadsheets, not only featuring him personally, but also his fellow poets, singers, lovers, writers, journey companions, friends, and agitators. Gathered here publicly for the first time is his personal archive of events and experiences documenting his life as a young man, breakaway poet, expansive spirit, curious intellectual traveler, and relentless enthusiast of the provocative and the profane.

There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored and archived at Stanford University’s Allen Ginsberg collection. Counterculture historian Pat Thomas, with the full cooperation of the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Peter Hale, has compiled and annotated a remarkable volume of material, unearthing in the process one astounding find after another. The result is a tome of previously unpublished historical paperwork and vintage graphics and photographs and ephemera that promises an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century.

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Pat Thomas is a counterculture historian and archival music producer (and liner-note writer) whose expertise and interests have helped him author such books as Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975 and Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary. He has co-curated Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980, co-edited My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed, an anthology of interviews about the iconic musician, and contributed to The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane: The Long Lost Rock n’ Roll Detective and Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack. Thomas was a consultant on the PBS documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and compiled the 3-CD box set The Last Word on First Blues for the Allen Ginsberg Estate (1970s recordings of Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Arthur Russell), and the 2-CD set Songs of Innocence and Experience of Ginsberg’s 1969 recordings (with Don Cherry and Elvin Jones) putting William Blake poems to music with vocals by Allen.

Peter Hale grew up in Italy, Germany, and then Boulder, CO where he earned a BA in Classics, Greek & Latin, from the University of Colorado, all the while attending classes in music, poetry and meditation at Naropa University. He became part of the staff at Allen Ginsberg’s office in 1992, and in 1997 helped craft his posthumous estate, which he currently manages. He studied Guitar with Dave Van Ronk & Danny Kalb, and Piano with Peter Barbieri. He currently produces his own music, and djs around NYC. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Bidding adieu to Freeman’s literary journal, with Jakuta Alikavazovic, Deborah Landau, Juan Gabriel Vazquez, and John Freeman

13 mars 2024 | 54 min

On this very special January night, editor extraordinaire John Freeman was joined by three of his star contributors, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and Deborah Landau to bid farewell to his literary journal.

Buy Freeman’s Conclusions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/freemans-conclusions

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Jakuta Alikavazovic (b.1979) is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her first novel, Corps Volatils (2008) won the Goncourt Prize for Best First Novel and her second and third novels, Le Londres-Luxor (2010) and La Blonde et Le Bunker (2012) won prizes in France and Italy. Her most recent novel, Night as it Falls (L’Avancee de la Nuit), was published by Faber in 2020. Her essay Comme un Ciel en Nous (Like a Sky in Us) won the Prix Medicis Essai 2021 and her collected newspaper columns Faites Un Voeu (Make a Wish) were published in 2022. She is working on a new novel to be delivered in 2023.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the author of 8 works of fiction, including the award-winning The Sound of Things Falling, The Shape of the Ruins and Retrospective. His work is published in 30 languages.

Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons. Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, as well as Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program

John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s and the author and editor of a dozen books, including Wind, Trees, Dictionary of the Undoing, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Orion, and been translated into over twenty languages. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York City, where he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf and hosts the monthly California Book Club -- a free online discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature -- for Alta magazine.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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On Friendship, with Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen

29 februari 2024 | 57 min

In early February, we hosted a riotous, tender, enchanting and uplifting evening of poetry and prose with the irrepressible Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen. After their readings they sat down with Adam Biles for a chat about friendship, a theme that unites their work.

Buy Hollie McNish’s Lobster here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/lobster

Buy Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/boy-friends-2

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Hollie McNish is a poet, author and lover based between Glasgow and Cambridge. She won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her poetic parenting memoir – Nobody Told Me – of which The Scotsman stated ‘the world needs this book’. She has published four further lovely collections of poetry –Papers, Cherry Pie, Plum, and Slug, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was published in French by Le Castor Astral under the title Je souhaite seulement que tu fasses quelque chose de toi. Her new book, Lobster and other things I'm learning to love, is out now and according to her dad is 'her best work yet'. She loves writing.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, and the Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 to rave reviews and was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. He’s unfurled three collections of poetry, the most recent being The Cat Prince & Other Poems—which won the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Poetry 2023. Pedersen has been shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and The Saltire National Book Awards, and won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. His work has attracted praise from the likes of: Stephen Fry, Irvine Welsh, Kae Tempest, Jackie Kay, Sara Pascoe, Nicola Sturgeon & many more.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Love in the Time of Creative-Writing Classes, with Brandon Taylor

14 februari 2024 | 51 min

Annabelle Hirsch, A History of Women in 101 Objects

31 januari 2024 | 53 min

☕Proust Questionnaire: Holly McNish & Michael Pedersen☕

17 januari 2024 | 84 min

In advance of their event at Shakespeare and Company this February 8th, poets Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen answer our café’s Proust Questionnaire. Be warned, this gets saucy quickly…

Find out more about their event here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/events/hollie-mcnish-michael-pedersen

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Hollie McNish is an award-winning poet, writer and performer.

She is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Slug (and other things I’ve been told to hate) and won the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry with her poetry and parenting memoir Nobody Told Me. She has two further poetry collections, Plum and Cherry Pie, one modern adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone and alongside fellow poet Sabrina Mahfouz, co-wrote Offside, a play relating the history of UK women’s football. She loves writing and her live readings are not to be missed.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, and the current Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. He’s published three acclaimed collections of poetry, with the title poem from his third, The Cat Prince & Other Poems, currently shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prizes. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 to rave reviews in the UK and North America and was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. Pedersen has won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and John Mather’s Trust Rising Star of Literature Award. His work has attracted praise from the likes of Stephen Fry, Kae Tempest, Irvine Welsh, Shirley Manson, Maggie Smith and many more. He also co-founded the prize-winning literary collective Neu! Reekie!.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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BLOOMCAST | HOLIDAY SPECIAL | THE DEAD

5 januari 2024 | 101 min

Our Bloomcasters reconvene on January 6th, “Joycension Day”, to discuss The Dead : the final piece in Joyce’s Dubliners, described by T. S. Eliot as "one of the greatest short stories ever written".

Leaning heavily as always on the wisdom of honorary Bloomcasters Declan Kiberd and Colm Toibin, they cover orchestrated dinner parties, ego death, the circularity of human life, the music of words, and much more.

Carrying forth a Bloomcast tradition, they also play a festive game, populating competing dinner parties with characters from Dubliners and Ulysses.

Happy New Year (and Joycension Day)!

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Mentioned in the podcast:

‘The Dead’, by James Joyce: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dubliners/The_Dead

Prof. Declan Kiberd, ‘Dubliners: The First 100 Years,’ at the James Joyce Center (2014):

https://youtu.be/A5qhK7LH6co?si=1zFc7EH7AOpuL1mq

Dubliners, with an introduction by Colm Toibin (Canongate): https://canongate.co.uk/books/1488-dubliners/

London Review of Books. ‘Arruginated’, by Colm Toibin: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n17/colm-toibin/arruginated

John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation of ‘The Dead’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkos62UPwVk

“The Lass of Aughrim,” from the Huston film:

https://youtu.be/I1CP5Lz2iHE?si=yfxE-koZ3PVngWIc

Annie Baker’s Infinite Life: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/infinite-life/

Circles by Ralph Waldo Emerson: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2944/2944-h/2944-h.htm#link2H_4_0010

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Alice McCrum is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Princeton University. Before starting her graduate work, Alice lived in Paris, where she taught at the Sorbonne, studied public policy at Sciences Po-Paris, and directed cultural programming at the American Library in Paris.

Lex Paulson is Director of Executive Programs at the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence (Morocco) and lectures in advocacy and human rights at Sciences Po-Paris. Trained in classics and community organizing, he served as mobilization strategist for the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He served as legislative counsel in the 111th U.S. Congress (2009-2011), organized on six U.S. presidential campaigns, and has worked to advance democratic innovation at the European Commission and in India, Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda, Senegal, Czech Republic and Ukraine. He is author of Cicero and the People’s Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic, from Cambridge University Press, and is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance.

Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. In 2022, he conceived and presented Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses—an epic, polyphonic celebration of James Joyce’s masterwork. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2016. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel, Beasts of England, was published in September 2023 by Galley Beggar Press, and will be published in 2025 by Editions Grasset. It was selected as a "2023 highlight" by The Guardian. A collection of his conversations with writers, The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews, was published by Canongate in October 2023

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😱On Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed, with Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Adam Thirlwell😱

3 januari 2024 | 65 min

👭🏼Naomi Klein on Doppelgangers, Conspiracy Theories, and the Shadowlands we all inhabit…👭🏼

20 december 2023 | 65 min

Claire-Louise Bennett on Nightflowers, her immersive installation at Museum of Literature Ireland

6 december 2023 | 56 min

🥘On Eating through the Endtimes, with C Pam Zhang🥘

22 november 2023 | 45 min

🐕On Life, Art and the Line Between the Two, with Jo Ann Beard🐕

8 november 2023 | 46 min

👁️Sandra Newman on Julia, her re-imagining of George Orwell’s 1984 👁️

25 oktober 2023 | 58 min

⛵Bidding adieu to a literary journal, with John Freeman (Feat. readings from Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Rebecca Makkai, and Mieko Kawakami read by translator Hitomi Yoshio)⛵

11 oktober 2023 | 68 min

🛏️On Not Sleeping, with Marie Darrieussecq🛏️

28 september 2023 | 41 min

This week, Adam was joined in the writer’s studio by Marie Darrieussecq, whose latest book Sleepless (translated by Penny Hueston and published by Fitzcarraldo) is one writer’s attempt to describe, understand, and perhaps overcome her insomnia. The passages in Sleepless that take us into the mind of the insomniac are somewhat like the experience of insomnia itself— at times fragmented and hynopgogic, at others dazzlingly alert and perceptive—while those that investigate the potential cures are captivating in their detail, description and weirdness. For those whose lives have never been blighted by insomnia, Sleepless will be a fascinating insight into this strangest and most psychologically traumatic of conditions, while those who have suffered it will find in these pages solidarity and solace.

Buy Sleepless: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/sleepless-5

Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and is recognized as one of the leading voices of contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has written more than twenty books. Text has published Tom Is Dead, All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby and Crossed Lines. In 2013 Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men. She has written art criticism and journalism for a number of publications, including Libération and Charlie Hebdo, and is also a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. She lives in Paris.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Get bonus content on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

🐖On Populism, Post-Truth, and Piggybacking George Orwell. Adam Biles in conversation with Rob Doyle.🐖

14 september 2023 | 68 min

This week our host switches chairs to discuss his new novel, Beasts of England, a state-of-the-farmyard novel about back-stabbers, truth-twisters and corrupt charlatans.

Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

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Manor Farm has reinvented itself as the South of England’s premium petting zoo. Now, instead of a working farm, humans and beasts alike are

invited (for a small fee) to come and stroke, fondle, and take rides on the farm’s inhabitants.

But life is not a bed of roses for the animals, in spite of what their leaders may want them to believe. Elections are rigged, the community is beset by factions, and sacred mottos are being constantly updated. The Farm is descending into chaos. What’s more, a mysterious ‘illness’ has started ripping through the animals, killing them one by one…

In Beasts of England, Adam Biles honours, updates and subverts George Orwell’s classic, all the while channelling the chaotic, fragmentary nature of populist politics in the Internet age into a savage farmyard satire.

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Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, from where he hosts their weekly podcast. In 2022, he conceived and presented Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses—an epic, polyphonic celebration of James Joyce’s masterwork. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2016, and was chosen by The Guardian as a Fiction Pick for 2016 and was a book of the year for The Observer, The Irish Times, The Millions and 3:AM Magazine. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel, Beasts of England, will be published in September 2023 by Galley Beggar Press, and in 2025 by Editions Grasset. It was selected as a "2023 highlight" by The Guardian. A collection of his conversations with writers, The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews, will be published by Canongate in October 2023.

Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’. Doyle has adapted it for film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle also has a published collection of short stories; This is the Ritual. Doyle is the editor of the anthology The Other Irish Tradition and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. His newest book Threshold will be published in 2020. He teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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💎Sunday Poetry: Emilie Moorhouse reads from Emerald Wounds, her new translation of the poems of Joyce Mansour💎

9 september 2023 | 15 min

🧠On Making Sense of a Murderer, with Mark O’Connell🧠

30 augusti 2023 | 57 min

🗞️On Power, Pamphlets, Parties and Possible Worlds, with Adam Thirlwell🗞️

16 augusti 2023 | 56 min

🪄On the KLF, Conspiracies, and Chaos with John Higgs🪄

2 augusti 2023 | 53 min

Sunday Poetry: Nick Laird reads from Up Late

22 juli 2023 | 19 min

On Writing, Wormholes, and Wasted Opportunities, with Isabel Waidner

19 juli 2023 | 50 min

🏫On writing and translating The Topeka School, with Ben Lerner and Jakuta Alikavazovic🏫

13 juli 2023 | 94 min

🏇On Blood, Sweat and Racetracking, with Kathryn Scanlan🏇

27 juni 2023 | 29 min

BONUS: Lex Paulson on Cicero and the Future of Democracy

15 juni 2023 | 61 min

Hernan Diaz on his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, Trust

13 juni 2023 | 60 min

Proust Questionnaire: Dolly Alderton!

7 juni 2023 | 40 min

Leïla Slimani on Inheritance, Hippies and the Literature of Disappointment

1 juni 2023 | 49 min

In Watch Us Dance—Leïla Slimani’s effervescent new novel—we rejoin the Belhaj family in 1968 a dozen years into the life on an independent Morocco. Amine and Mathilde have completed their journey from peasant farmers to paid-up members of the local bourgeoisie. Their daughter Aicha is in Strasbourg training to be a Doctor. They have just built a private swimming pool, and Amine is exploiting his position of a man of power to have extramarital affairs across the city.

But these are turbulent times: students and workers, in cities all over the world, are in revolt, the consumer society is being born, and the Americans are preparing to put a man on the moon.

And then there are the hippies, many of whom are washing up on the shores around in Essaouira hoping to expand their minds, and avoid the draft, during their stay in this Moroccan port.

Watch Us Dance, throbs with life and colour, and Leila Slimani navigates between the macro and the micro with extraordinary authorial dexterity. It’s a novel that somehow sweeps readers up in the tides of history, while never shifting their attention from the minutiae of grievances, but also affections, that criss-cross every family.

Buy Watch Us Dance: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7955500/watch-us-dance

Leïla Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, which she won for Lullaby. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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BONUS: Martin Amis in conversation with Will Self (2010)

22 maj 2023 | 40 min

On Anti-Memoir, the Weird, and New Kinds of Disaster, with M. John Harrison

22 maj 2023 | 56 min

On Unclassifiable Books and Uncategorisable Lives, with Xiaolu Guo

4 maj 2023 | 38 min

How Westminster Works . . . and Why it Doesn’t, with Ian Dunt

17 april 2023 | 62 min

✖️On Art, Alternative Histories, and the Arbitrariness of Life with Catherine Lacey✖️

5 april 2023 | 59 min

📚How to Resist Amazon and Why, with Danny Caine📚

22 mars 2023 | 50 min

On Old Wounds, Finding Peace, and Returning Home, with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

8 mars 2023 | 43 min

🗺️On Sarajevo, Multiple Worlds and History at the Fringes, with Aleksandar Hemon🗺️

22 februari 2023 | 64 min

❤️‍🔥Valentine’s Special: Meena Kandasamy on The Book of Desire❤️‍🔥

8 februari 2023 | 48 min

Our guest for this year’s Valentine’s Special is one of the most innovative, radical and compelling writers at work today Meena Kandasamy. This year Meena returns to poetry with The Book of Desire, a new translation of the third part of the Thirukural, the foundational poem of Tamil culture. With her new version, Kandasamy offers a feminist interventionist translation that feels fresh, lively and sensual. Meena Kandasamy’s The Book of Desire is a genuine marvel.

Buy The Book of Desire: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7747662/kandasamy-meena-the-book-of-desire

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for bonus episodes and access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Poet, novelist, activist and translator, Meena Kandasamy has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), and the critically acclaimed novel, Gypsy Goddess. Her second novel, When I Hit You, was chosen as a book of the year by The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, and The Observer and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018. In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded International Pen’s Hermann Kesten Prize for her work as “a fearless fighter for democracy, human rights and the free word.”

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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On Parents, Grief and the difference between Fiction and Memoir, with Elizabeth McCracken

25 januari 2023 | 51 min

Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel The Hero of this Book is the profound and poignant account of one writer’s attempt to convey something of the irrepressible, indomitable, indefatigable, almost indescribable character of her recently deceased mother on the page. Although the narrator repeatedly stresses that this is a novel, and not a memoir, that’s to say neither a memoir by McCracken nor a memoir by the narrator…although what exactly the difference is between each of the two forms, and how each lends itself to the task at hand, is also an important interrogation of this extraordinary and tender book.

Buy The Hero of this Book: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7384323/mccracken-elizabeth-the-hero-of-this-book

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for bonus episodes and access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award), The Souvenir Museum and The Hero of This Book. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta's 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🎸Music, Sugar and other Obsessions, with Don Paterson🎸

11 januari 2023 | 58 min

This week Adam is joined by Don Paterson, multi-award winning, and much beloved poet, and now author of one of the extraordinary and refreshing memoir, TOY FIGHTS: A BOYHOOD. Charting the first two decades of the poet’s life, from his birth in Dundee to his move to London, TOY FIGHTS is a book about many things: music, class, religion, origami, money, mental illness, and family. It’s also about poetry, although perhaps in a more oblique way than the reader might be expecting.

TOY FIGHTS is both uproariously funny, and yet profoundly tender, and manages to be sobecause it is stuffed with that ingredient by which any memoir succeeds or fails—authenticity. It’s also a deeply political book, although one which not only eschews ideology and facile categorisations of class, but vigorously pours scorn upon then.

Buy Toy Fights: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7753105/paterson-don-toy-fights

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for bonus episodes and access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes and, on two occasions, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and, for over twenty-five years, was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He also works as a jazz musician.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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📚Books of the Year📚

28 december 2022 | 27 min

In this special episode of the Shakespeare and Company podcast, we look back at our bookseller’s favourite reads of the year.

Some of these titles were published in 2022, others just happened to rise to the top of their respective “to read” piles in the past twelve months…but they all come with the S&Co. stamp of approval.

There’s something for everyone here, from a rock star’s autobiography, to a novel about a 19th century translator’s revolt, to a classic of modern science fiction that spans something like a billion earth years.

Find the full list below.

Sign up to our newsletter: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/subscriptions

Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6316982/kaminsky-ilya-dancing-in-odessa

Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Coco Mellors: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6416524/mellors-coco-cleopatra-and-frankenstein

Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6461812/whitehead-colson-harlem-shuffle

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6433167/harris-nathan-the-sweetness-of-water

From a Low and Quiet Sea, Donal Ryan: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6871035/ryan-donal-from-a-low-and-quiet-sea

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6192095/louise-kennedy-kennedy-trespasses

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger and Stella Maris: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5474563/mccarthy-cormac-the-passenger

Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6294505/nelson-caleb-azumah-open-water

Babel Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, R. F. Kuang: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6031122/kuang-r-f-babel

The Hummingbird, Sandro Veronesi: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6191021/veronesi-sandro-the-hummingbird

The Queens of Sarmiento Park, Camila Sosa Villada: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6111567/villada-camila-sosa-the-queens-of-sarmiento-park

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5227917/liu-cixin-the-three-body-problem

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6951005/saunders-george-a-swim-in-a-pond-in-the-rain

Agatha Christie, Lucy Worsley: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6007132/worsley-lucy-agatha-christie

The Storyteller, Dave Grohl: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6113617/grohl-dave-the-storyteller

The Naked Don't Fear the Water, Matthieu Aikins: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6088623/aikins-matthieu-the-naked-don-t-fear-the-water

The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7314067/thunberg-greta-the-climate-book

Fight Night, Miriam Toews: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5994736/toews-miriam-fight-night

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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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👩‍🎨Katy Hessel on The Story of Art Without Men👩‍🎨

21 december 2022 | 62 min

Katy Hessel made her name highlighting the grotesque disparity between the representation of men and women in art galleries and fighting to correct it. Through her podcast and Instagram account, The Great Women artists, and now in her magisterial book The Story of Art Without Men. Beginning in the 16th century, Hessel demonstrates time and again how women have been erased from the history of art, and how—time and again—despite the restrictions imposed by the constraints of the patriarchy have proven significantly more radical and inventive than their male counterparts.

Buy The Story of Art Without Men here:

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for bonus episodes and access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Katy Hessel is an art historian, presenter, and curator dedicated to celebrating female artists. The founder of @thegreatwomenartists on Instagram and the podcast of the same name, she lives in London.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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📘BLOOMCAST | HOLIDAY SPECIAL📘

15 december 2022 | 81 min

🔥Sarah Churchwell on Gone with the Wind, January 6th, and the Lies America Tells🔥

7 december 2022 | 66 min

Gone with the Wind is one of the highest grossing films of all time, based on one of the bestselling novels ever written. It is also, according to Sarah Churchwell in her new book, a story “ about enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter. Which”—Churchwell adds “is pretty much the story of American history.”

The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells provides a powerful critique of the book and film, and an excoriating analysis of how it has shaped the way Americans understand their country, rewrite their history, and excuse their crimes.

Buy The Wrath to Come here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6334239/churchwell-sarah-the-wrath-to-come

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for bonus episodes and access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Her literary journalism has appeared widely in newspapers including the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review, and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio, where appearances include Question Time, Newsnight and The Review Show. She has judged many literary prizes, including the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and she was a co-winner of the 2015 Eccles British Library Writer’s Award.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Get bonus content on Patreon

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🔔Hunchback of Notre-Dame Special! 🔔

2 december 2022 | 59 min

🔔Hunchback of Notre-Dame Special! 🔔

To celebrate the launch of our exclusive S&Co edition of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame—as well as a limited-edition gift bundle featuring a signed print of the beautiful cover art—Adam is joined by Krista Halverson, S&Co Publishing Director, and artist Neil Gower, to discuss this extraordinary classic of French literature.

Find out more about our Hunchback of Notre-Dame Bundle here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7931829/the-hunchback-bundle

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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Bundle benefits the Friends of Shakespeare and Company Association and includes :

- A copy of Shakespeare and Company’s 2022 edition of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, inked with the bookshop stamp. Produced in collaboration with Penguin Classics, the paperback has a gatefold cover, with original artwork and metallic-ink details, and a new introduction penned by the bookshop’s editors.

- A print of the cover illustration, hand-signed by its brilliant artist, Neil Gower, and stamped on the back with the bookshop’s hallmark and the date. It measures 37cm by 26cm (14.5" by 10.2") and was printed on 320g paper stock by Art & Caractère in Lavaur, France.

All proceeds from the bundle go to Friends of Shakespeare and Company, a not-for-profit association created during the pandemic to support the bookshop’s noncommercial activities. These include our free author events, upstairs reading library, Tumbleweed guest program, weekly podcast, publishing projects, and writers’ rooms, where since 1951 more than 30,000 poets and authors have slept the night for free in Paris. Because the new Association is taking on the related costs of these endeavours, we are better able to begin rebuilding the bookshop financially, to better safeguard Shakespeare and Company for the future—all while not having to sacrifice what’s at the heart of the bookshop: a community of readers and writers.

Buy our Hunchback of Notre-Dame Bundle here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7931829/the-hunchback-bundle

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Krista Halverson is publishing director at Shakespeare and Company. She wrote and edited the book Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, and she is co-editor of the forthcoming poetry anthology, Paris in Our View, featuring poems about the French capital--it will be published by the bookshop early next year. Prior to moving to Paris, she was the managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, Francis Ford Coppola's literary and art quarterly, based in San Francisco.

Neil Gower is an internationally acclaimed graphic artist, best known for his book jackets (Bill Bryson, William Golding) and his literary cartography (Kazuo Ishiguro, Jilly Cooper, Simon Armitage). His work has been widely published in Europe and the US, including magazines such as The New Yorker, The Economist and Vanity Fair. He was Contributing Artist to Conde Nast Traveler in New York for 10 years. In 2017, he illustrated/co-authored As Kingfishers Catch Fire, a literary ornithology, with Alex Preston. The intensity and giddiness of distilling written evocations of birds into paint realigned his creativity towards exploring possibilities with his own words. His first collection of poetry Meet Me in Palermo was recently published by The Frogmore Press.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🐋How to Speak to Whales (and other animals…) with Tom Mustill🐋

24 november 2022 | 72 min

How to Speak Whale is an investigation into the possibility, or otherwise, of human cetacean dialogue. It looks into the history of our relationship with these creatures—in some important ways so similar to us, in others, so profoundly different. It lays out our various attempts to interpret their song, and looks at how big data, combined with an open source philosophy might allow us to create a “Google Translate for animals”.

It’s also one man’s quest to make sense of the particular, transcendent but terrifying moment, a humpback whale almost landed on top of him.

Buy How to Speak Whale: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6534146/mustill-tom-how-to-speak-whale

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for bonus episodes and access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Tom Mustill studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, before becoming a conservation biologist and then a wildlife filmmaker. His work with David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg, Stephen Fry and other conservation and science heroes across the globe have won over 30 international awards, including two Webbys, a Wildscreen Panda, two Jackson Wild Awards, as well as a Primetime Emmy nomination. He directed on the blockbuster Inside Nature's Giants' series which won a BAFTA, Royal Television Society and Broadcast award, as well as the ZSL Award for Communicating Zoology.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Get bonus content on Patreon

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💋On Love, Loss and Life in New York, with Coco Mellors💋

16 november 2022 | 55 min

This week we were joined in the writer’s studio by Coco Mellors, author of one of our biggest selling novels of the year, Cleopatra and Frankenstein.

It’s the story of a woman and a man—Cleo and Frank—who meet in New York on New Year’s Eve 2006, who fall in love despite—or perhaps because of—their very many differences, and whose marriage within months causes not only an earthquake in their own lives, but also sends disruptive aftershocks out into the lives of their friends and families. All of which makes Cleopatra and Frankenstein one of the most devilishly readable debuts of the year.

Buy Cleopatra and Frankenstein: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6416505/mellors-coco-cleopatra-and-frankenstein

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Coco Mellors grew up in London and New York. She has an MFA from New York University, where she was a recipient of the Goldwater Fellowship. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California with her husband.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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On Writing the Queer, Indigenous Experience with Billy-Ray Belcourt

9 november 2022 | 54 min

This week we welcome celebrated poet Billy-Ray Belcourt to discuss his innovative and moving debut novel A Minor Chorus.

In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.

Buy A Minor Chorus: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7312862/a-minor-chorus-a-novel

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular archive episodes and access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of four books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, A History of My Brief Body, and A Minor Chorus.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🍫Jonathan Coe on Bournville🍫

2 november 2022 | 62 min

Bournville, Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, ostensibly follows the life of Mary Lamb (née Clarke) from VE Day 1945, when she was a precocious young pianist, to the darkest depths of the recent pandemic, stopping off at some of the events that helped define (and redefine) Britain over the last seven decades. As we hop from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, to the 1966 World Cup, through jubilees and the death of Princess Diana, we live not only alongside Mary, but also her parents, her husband, her children and grandchildren, (and in a wider sense the British people as a whole) seeing these events through their eyes, and feeling their sense of excitement or despair at the changes and upheavals in their world.

Buy Bournville: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7673827/coe-jonathan-bournville

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Jonathan Coe was born a few miles from Bournville in 1961. The author of political satires such as What a Carve Up! and Number 11, and family sagas such as The Rotters' Club and The Rain Before It Falls, his novels have won prizes at home and abroad, including Costa Novel of the Year and the Prix du Livre Européen (both for Middle England).

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🍄Psychedelic Storytelling, DIY Magick, and the New Masculinity, with David Keenan🍄

26 oktober 2022 | 53 min

David Keenan's Industry of Magic and Light transports readers to the Scottish town of Airdrie in the 1960s and 70s, through a catalogue of relics from the local counterculture scene — or as the small ad describes it “Bunch of Local Hippy S**t for Sale. Job lot”. Expressed narrowly, the novel tells the story of the purveyors of a revolutionary psychadelic light show. But there’s nothing narrow about David Keenan’s books. Through this portrait of a band, we get to know a town, its inhabitants, their fascinations, their beliefs, their trips, and how it all hangs together—socially, culturally, cosmically.… Like all of Keenan’s books, it's a ferocious ride of a novel that demands to be read at least twice to get any kind of grasp — which is no burden at all, given how much fun it is to spend time in his world.

Buy Industry of Magic and Light: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7392461/keenan-david-industry-of-magic-et-light

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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David Keenan is the author of five critically-acclaimed novels; the cult classic This is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize; The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, Xstabeth and Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🥊 Miriam Toews on Sweary Matriarchs, the Absurdity of Life, and the Human Imperative to Experience Joy🥊

20 oktober 2022 | 53 min

Fight Night by Miriam Toews is a love letter to mothers and daughters, and grandmothers and granddaughters. Told from the perspective of nine-year-old Swiv, who’s having to deal with the imminent upheavals of the birth of a sibling and the declining health of her beloved grandma. With Swiv’s opening words — “Dear Dad, How are you? I was expelled.” — readers are drawn into the chaotic, ramshackle but love-and-life-filled world of this family. A world in which the only way through is to fight.

Buy Fight Night: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6240767/toews-miriam-fight-night

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Miriam Toews is the author of seven novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, All My Puny Sorrows, and Women Talking, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust…

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🎤 Sunday Poetry: Mark Polizzotti reads his new translations of Arthur Rimbaud🎤

15 oktober 2022 | 16 min

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading **

A series of short readings from some of our favourite poets.

Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. In this essential volume, renowned translator Mark Polizzotti offers authoritative and inspired new versions of Rimbaud’s major poems and letters, including generous selection of Illuminations and the entirety of his lacerating confession A Season in Hell—capturing as never before not only the meaning but also the daredevil attitudes and incantatory rhythms that make Rimbaud’s works among the most perpetually modern of his or any other generation.

Buy The Drunken Boat - Selected Writings: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6010246/rimbaud-arthu-the-drunken-boat

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.

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🎈William Boyd, The Romantic🎈

12 oktober 2022 | 57 min

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading **

No writer does the life-spanning novel in such a devilishly entertaining yet thought-provoking way as this week’s guest, William Boyd. His new book, The Romantic, follows the meandering, fortune-making-and-fortune-losing story of Cashel Greville Ross who travels the world, embarks on adventures, and falls in love, all across the nineteenth century. Often passionate, sometimes reckless, always psychologically fascinating, Cashel Greville Ross is both a man of his time and perhaps, in certain ways, a hero for our age.

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William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🏅BONUS: Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize in Literature🏅

7 oktober 2022 | 66 min

🐴💰On Friendship and Redemption in the time of the Gold Rush, with Paddy Crewe💰🐴

5 oktober 2022 | 45 min

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading **

The protagonist of My Name is Yip is, in his own written words, “a mute”, he also stands at 4 feet 8 inches tall and again in his words, “there is not a single hair on my person.” These physical limitations, coupled with the fact that Yip lives in the state of Georgia during the early nineteenth century gold rush, might make you imagine that a brutish and limited life awaited him. And yet, through Yip Tolroy’s sheer force of character, as well as a few twists of fate, his is a story full of adventure, intensity, and human feeling. The voice of Yip is an act of extraordinary literary ventriloquism on the part of debut novelist Paddy Crewe, who so utterly inhabits not only Yip’s mind, but also his epoch, and his geography, that every page of this book hums with an authenticity so rarely achieved in historical fiction.

Buy My Name is Yip here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6006015/crewe-paddy-my-name-is-yip

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Paddy Crewe was born in Stockton-on-Tees. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London. His first novel, My Name Is Yip, was published by Penguin in April 2022.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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👭🏽On Friendship, Politics and when the Two Collide, with Kamila Shamsie👭🏽

28 september 2022 | 56 min

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading **

Kamila Shamsie’s new novel Best of Friends begins in Karachi in 1988, a year that would prove pivotal in the political history of Pakistan. Zahra and Maryam are teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood, finding their feet in a world where they have to keep one eye on the intrigues of the school yard and the other on the lives into which they are expecting or expected to step. Lives of vast opportunity but also uncertainty. In fact perhaps the only certainty for both Zahra and Maryam is their friendship. Rock solid since the age of four. But then something happens, or perhaps better to say almost happens, that continues to cast a shadow thirty years later when the story picks up again in London.

Buy Best of Friends here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5782828/kamila-shamsie-shamsie-best-of-friends

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Kamila Shamsie was born and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. Her most recent novel Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the London Hellenic Prize. She is the author of six previous novels including Burnt Shadows, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and A God in Every Stone, shortlisted for the Women’s Bailey’s Prize and the Walter Scott Prize. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Kamila Shamsie is a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature and was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 2013. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in London.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🎸🤵‍♂️The Beatles, James Bond and the British Psyche ,with John Higgs🤵‍♂️🎸

21 september 2022 | 61 min

**Contains outrageous spoilers about the recent Bond film No Time to Die**

There are few cultural phenomena that rival the impact, reach and longevity of either The Beatles or James Bond. That both made their first significant impact on the public consciousness on the same day 5 October 1962 — with the release of the Beatles’ first record “Love Me Do’ and Dr. No the first James Bond film — was a significant enough piece of synchronicity for John Higgs to begin an investigation into the decades-long dance between two very different visions of the world, of Britain, of masculinity of art, of love and — inevitably — of death.

Buy Love and Let Die here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6267356/higgs-john-love-and-let-die

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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John Higgs is a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives, hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, which can change the way we see the world. In the words of MOJO magazine, “Reading John Higgs is like being shot with a diamond. Suddenly everything becomes terrifyingly clear”. The Times agreed, saying that “Higgs’s prose has a diamond-hard quality. He knows how to make us relate.” “A while ago I decided to read anything Higgs writes,” said Frank Cottrell Boyce, “He seems to be able to take any subject — pop music, Watling Street, conspiracy theories, robotics — and poke at it until it yields up its secrets.” Russell Brand described him succinctly as “a great writer […] who pulls shit together in an interesting way.”

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🎤 Sunday Poetry: Tayi Tibble reads from Poūkahangatus🎤

17 september 2022 | 6 min

A new series of short readings from some of our favourite poets.

Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing.

Buy Poūkahangatus: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6037217/tibble-tayi-poukahangatus

Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Poūkahangatus (pronounced “Pocahontas”), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies—Greek, Māori, feminist, kiwi—peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight to exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions (“The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard”). Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and ruination of her surroundings.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🎹Ian McEwan on Lessons🎹

14 september 2022 | 61 min

Lessons, Ian McEwan’s new novel, works from an intimate perspective, but on an epic scale. We accompany Roland Baines at different moments of his life—military brat, baby boomer, failed poet, pubescent boarder, single father, lounge pianist for hire—as he lives and relives some of the experiences—both domestic and world-historical—that moulded him. But as the years go by, and Roland’s sense of exactly how he was shaped and by whom changes, we readers come to understand how much our own apprehension of the past is tinted by our experience of the present.

Buy Lessons here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7495498/mcewan-ian-lessons

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🇺🇸 A.M. Homes on Satire, the American Dream, and Reaching Across the Political Divide🇺🇸

7 september 2022 | 53 min

This week’s guest is A.M. Homes whose new novel The Unfolding invites readers into the lives of a wealthy, John-McCain supporting Republican family on the day of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, which turns into a satirical “origin story” for the MAGA movement, as well a book about families, the frustrations they fester, and the lies and compromises that sustain them.

Buy The Unfolding here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7284774/homes-a-m-y-the-unfolding

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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A.M. Homes is the author of thirteen books, among them the best-selling memoir The Mistress’ Daughter; the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, The End of Alice, and Jack; and the short story collections Days of Awe, The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She also writes for film and television and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🐇On Transcendence, Parental Failure & writing Indiana, with Tess Gunty🐇

31 augusti 2022 | 47 min

This week's guest is Tess Gunty, winner of the 2022 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for her novel The Rabbit Hutch.

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The Rabbit Hutch is a low-cost housing complex in the post-industrial town of Vacca Vale, Indiana. It’s home to a mix of generations and familial constellations—couples, singletons, roommates—whose lives ebb and flow according to the economic and social forces that surround them, as well as the deeper-flowing currents of their pasts.

It’s also home to Blandine who, we learn at the beginning of Tess Gunty’s novel—isn’t like the other residents of her building. How and, crucially, why this is the case are the questions at the heart of the book.

But beyond the Rabbit Hutch, beyond Vacca Vale Indiana, beyond the United States even, The Rabbit Hutch is also a book about how our lives intersect, how our actions impact upon the lives of people we didn’t even know existed, and how a little bit of human cruelty, can go a long way but how human tenderness can go even further.

Rick Moody called Tess Gunty a writer of “uncommon originality, both in terms of voice and vision” while Jonathan Safran Foer described the Rabbit Hutch as “a profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art.”

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. She received a B.A. in English with an Honors Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, where she won the Ernest Sandeen Award for her poetry collection. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow, and her work was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Iowa Review, Freeman’s, and other publications, and she lives in Los Angeles.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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☭🎩When Young Stalin came to London, with Stephen May🎩☭

24 augusti 2022 | 47 min

This week’s guest is Stephen May whose fifth novel, Sell Us the Rope is a fictional retelling of events surrounding the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party, which took place in London in 1907.

We spend most of our time following Koba—as the young man who would become Stalin was then known—as he arrives in a poverty-riddled city, and plunges into the heart of turn-of-the-century revolutionary politics. There’s factionalism, and arguments, and strategising, and backstabbing, and money-grubbing, as well as the constant shadowy presence of the Okhrana—Russia’s over active secret police force. There are also appearances by some of the defining personalities of the 20th-century—Lenin, Trotsky, Gorky and Rosa Luxembourg among them—long before they left their indelible marks on modern history.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Stephen May is the author of five novels including Life! Death! Prizes! which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year and is a winner of the Media Wales Reader’s Prize. He has also written plays, as well as for television and film. He lives in West Yorkshire.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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After Sappho, with Selby Wynn Schwartz

17 augusti 2022 | 57 min

This week we welcome Booker-longlisted Selby Wynn Schwartz, whose debut novel After Sappho is a fountain of fleeting fragments that together depict in lush psychical detail the lives of a group of lesbian women in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe. Except Selby Wynn Schwartz does not just tell the story of these women, or even retell it, but—inspired by the splintered remains of Sappho’s poetry—reinvents the very form of the novel, turning it into something more diffuse, more choric and more radical.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and their Afterlives, a 2020 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. Her creative work has appeared in Speculative Nonfiction, Lammergeier, and Passages North; her first novella, A Life in Chameleons, won the 2021 Reflex Press Novella.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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👨🏼✨Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man✨👨🏾

10 augusti 2022 | 52 min

The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid’s startling new novel, holds up a shattered mirror to readers, reflecting back a recognisable, but heightened and reconfigured version of our world.

One morning Anders, a white man, wakes up to find that his skin is now dark — with no indication as to how this has happened, or why now, why to him. Anders must reckon with this metamorphosis, how it changes the way he looks at himself, how others look at him, and how he looks at others looking at him… The Last White Man somehow feels at once like an age-old story, and something strikingly new and causes readers to reflect upon the preconceptions and prejudices that structure our lives.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of Exit West, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Discontent and its Civilizations. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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⏳Time Travel, Autofiction & Never-ending Book Tours, with Emily St John Mandel⌛

3 augusti 2022 | 46 min

🎓😵‍💫Disorientation: A Wild Satire of 21st-Century Campus Life, with Elaine Hsieh Chou😵‍💫🎓

27 juli 2022 | 58 min

This week we welcome former S&Co bookseller, Elaine Hsieh Chou, to discuss Disorientation, a campus novel retooled for the 21st century. Disorientation rushes headlong into some of the most fractious debates that are animating college campuses across the world: systemic injustice in academia, freedom of expression, and safe spaces, not forgetting the specific obstacles and prejudices faced by Asian Americans as they work to get a foothold on the academic ladder.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, her short fiction appears in The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online and Ploughshares. Her debut novel DISORIENTATION is out from Penguin Press (US) and will be out from Picador (UK) on July 21, 2022. Her short story collection WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM? is forthcoming from Penguin Press.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🇬🇧🔨How Britain Broke the World, with Arthur Snell🔨🇬🇧

20 juli 2022 | 58 min

🎾Geoff Dyer on Roger Federer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sensing an Ending…🎾

13 juli 2022 | 63 min

There are few people who can write so brilliantly, about so many subjects, all at once, as Geoff Dyer. The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings could be his most wide ranging to date. It’s about tennis—as the title suggests—and specifically about the curtain dropping on the career of one of the most successful, and most technically beautiful players, ever. But it’s also about endings of so many other kinds: the significance, or otherwise, of an artist’s last work; mental and intellectual decline; finishing and not finishing books; and why, perhaps, deep down, we really just long for everything to come to be over with...

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ’s Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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👨‍❤️‍👨On Love, Grief and Male Friendship, with Michael Pedersen👨‍❤️‍👨

6 juli 2022 | 56 min

This week’s guest is Michael Pedersen, whose new book Boy Friends is a profoundly personal, searingly honest examination of grief, inspired by the death of Scott Hutchison, the author’s dearest friend, and artistic co-conspirator Although heartbreaking at moments, Boy Friends is by no means a depressing book. In fact it’s funny, and tender, and insightful, as well as an authentic and touching quest to give voice to the maelstrom of emotions such a devastating loss provokes. It’s also an examination of male friendship, and the difficulties many of us have expressing the love that underpins them, having been brought up in societies that minimise or mock such emotions.

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author. His second collection, Oyster, was published in 2017 and was illustrated by and performed as a live show with Scott Hutchison (of Scottish band Frightened Rabbit). Pedersen has been named one of Canongate’s Future 40; was a finalist for the 2018 Writer of the Year at the Herald Scottish Culture Awards; was awarded the 2014 John Mather Trust Rising Star of Literature Award; and won a 2015 Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Pedersen also co-founded Neu! Reekie!, a prize-winning arts collective that has produced cutting-edge shows around the world for over ten years.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🎙️🍃Ali Smith on Companion Piece (live in the bookshop!)🍃🎙️

29 juni 2022 | 53 min

We were joined in store this week by the wonderful Ali Smith to discuss Companion Piece, the the fifth-volume in the increasingly inaccurately named Seasons Quartet.

Taking the ongoing pandemic as its backdrop, Companion Piece is a mischievous, enigmatic puzzle of a novel, that examines how companionship and togetherness might be possible in a world in which everything—from a deadly virus to the vested interests of corrupt politicians—is fighting to divide us.

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, How to be both, Shire, Artful, There but for the, The first person and other stories, Girl Meets Boy, The Accidental, The whole story and other stories, Hotel World, Other stories and other stories, Like and Free Love. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Bailey's Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and Winter was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2018. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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🐑Ottessa Moshfegh on Power, Magic…and her Pirate Ancestors🐑

22 juni 2022 | 56 min

Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh’s extraordinary fourth novel, unfolds in a medieval fiefdom of the same name. It’s a story of struggle in a world in which one human wields absolute power over another, but in which all must submit to a Nature that writhes and wriggles, and has still not been fully stripped of its capacity for magic. It’s also a world in which God and the Devil have a very real impact upon Lapvonians’s lives, and in which the next village feels like another world, but heaven and hell are within grasping distance.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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🥀On Darkness, Fables and Heartbreak, with Vanessa Onwuemezi🥀

15 juni 2022 | 53 min

A World Without Men, with Sandra Newman (Live at Hey Festival)

8 juni 2022 | 47 min

In this special live episode, recorded at the Hay Festival, we were joined by Sandra Newman, whose new novel The Men takes a very stark idea and runs with it. What would happen, to the world, to society, to minds, if one day all the Men, and boys—everyone with a Y chromosome in fact—just disappeared? Newman’s vision is of a world set free, but also a world plunged into mourning, in which some structures collapse while others hold firm, in which certain of those left behind cling on to the “religious” idea of Men, and all they stood for, while others set about adapting, organising and rebuilding something better.

Buy The Men here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783789016/the-men

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Sandra Newman is the author of four previous novels; The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, (shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award), Cake, The Country of Ice Cream Star (longlisted for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Literature) and The Heavens. She co-authored the hugely successful How Not to Write a Novel with Howard Mittelmark. She has also written The Western Lit Survival Kit, Read This Next, and a memoir, Changeling. She lives in New York.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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On Bodies, Freedom and Change, with Olivia Laing

25 maj 2022 | 63 min

Meg Mason on Sorrow and Bliss

18 maj 2022 | 60 min

This week’s guest is Meg Mason, author of the literary sensation Sorrow and Bliss.

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'It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud... Extraordinary'

Guardian

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.

So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

*

Meg Mason began her career at the Financial Times and The Times of London. Her work has since appeared in The Sunday Times UK, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written humour for Sunday STYLE magazine and The New Yorker's Daily Shouts and been a regular columnist for GQ and contributor to ELLE, marie claire and Vogue. Her first novel You Be Mother was published in 2017. It was followed by Sorrow and Bliss, first released in Australia in 2020, then published in the US in February 2021 and out in the UK in June 2021. The studio, New Regency, is adapting Sorrow and Bliss for screen. Visit megmason.com for more.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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📱Love (and Life) in the time of Algorithms, with Jem Calder📱

11 maj 2022 | 52 min

This week’s guest is guest is Jem Calder, author of Reward System a series of interlinked stories that charts a group of friends in their mid-twenties as they struggle to make something of their lives in an indifferent, often hostile, 21st century metropolis.

Sally Rooney said that “Reward System is an exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Reading these stories, I found myself thinking newly and differently about contemporary life” while Holly Pester called it “'A crushing and clear-sighted portrayal of people dodging the alienation of work, money and life's digital shorelines” adding that the short scenes were “so brilliantly observed I felt the reality of a generation in every detail.”

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Jem Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. Reward System is his first book

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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🐍🎲Luck, Life and Little Snakes, with DBC Pierre🎲🐍

4 maj 2022 | 57 min

DBC Pierre’s Big Snake Little Snake is a characteristically freewheeling, riotous account of a couple of years the author lived in the Caribbean, spending his time, among other endeavours, conducting an inquiry into risk. It’s also an extraordinarily fun book, yet with a deep seriousness at its core. Seeking to understand, as it does, how the world can be presented to us as fundamentally indifferent, while also being so clearly, and so often, unfair.

Buy Big Snake, Little Snake here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781788169776/big-snake-little-snake-an-inquiry-into-risk

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

*

One of the nation's most uncompromising literary voices, DBC Pierre is author of the novels VERNON GOD LITTLE, LUDMILA'S BROKEN ENGLISH and LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND, plus the picture book for distracted adults PETIT MAL and the Hammer novella BREAKFAST WITH THE BORGIAS. The novel VERNON GOD LITTLE sold in 43 territories and won the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Award and the James Joyce Award from University College Dublin. His ground-breaking new novel MEANWHILE IN DOPAMINE CITY was published by Faber & Faber in August2020 and is short-listed for The Goldsmiths Prize.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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On imagining what hasn’t, can’t and won’t imagine you, with Margo Jefferson

27 april 2022 | 51 min

Despite being a lauded writer and critic, despite being the winner of a Pulitzer Prize even, Margo Jefferson innovates and takes risks like a writer with nothing to lose. Her new book, Constructing a Nervous System is both the history of a mind’s formation and the deconstruction of a culture and its tropes, as well as what feels like a form of self-analysis taking place on the page, beneath the readers eyes, in real time. It’s a book about race and gender, but also of family and culture, where all four intersect, and how one person used the limitations society sought to place on her as a ladder to climb free of them.

Buy Constructing a Nervous System here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783789009/constructing-a-nervous-system-a-memoir

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine, and The New Republic. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

*

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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On Prison, Literature and Grief with Preti Taneja

20 april 2022 | 57 min

On 29 November 2019, Usman Kahn attacked and killed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at Fishmongers Hall in London, and was later shot dead by police on London Bridge. Jones and Merritt were involved in a prison education programme in which Kahn had participated. All three had gathered at an event that day to mark five years of the programme. Preti Taneja also worked on that programme as a teacher of creative writing in prisons. Jack Merritt oversaw her work. Kahn was one of her students. Aftermath, is Taneja’s attempt to come to an understanding of these events both how they called into question what had come before and the grief and trauma they engendered.

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Preti Taneja is a writer and activist. Her first novel, We That Are Young, won the Desmond Elliott Prize and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski. It has been translated into several languages. Her second book is Aftermath, a lament on the language of prison, terror, trauma and grief. Taneja is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She is a contributing editor at And Other Stories, and at The White Review.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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Superstar Poets and (Step)Fatherhood in Chile, with Alejandro Zambra

13 april 2022 | 75 min

Superstar Poets and (Step)Fatherhood in Chile, with Alejandro Zambra

What is a Chilean Poet? According to Pru, one of the characters in Alejandro Zambra’s latest novel, ‘Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or a Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model.’ That’s to say they are famous, respected and wealthy…or at least, some of them are. But what makes a Chilean poet? That’s a little harder to pin down, and in a way it’s this question that bugs not only the writer of this extraordinary and charming novel, but also several of its characters—Gonzalo and his step-son Vicente chief among them. Chilean Poet is a tender and moving depiction of a country, an art-form, and a family. It’s deeply insightful on the subjects of parenthood, class and failure, and it’s also got some of the most brilliantly written, and staggeringly awkward, examples of lovemaking—both adolescent and middle-aged—we’ve ever had the squiriming pleasure to read.

Buy Chilean Poet here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783782888/chilean-poet

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Alejandro Zambra was born in Santiago, Chile in 1975. He is the author of two books of poems, Bahía Inútil and Mudanza; a collection of essays, No leer; and three novels, Bonsái, which was awarded a Chilean Critics Award for best novel, The Private Lives of Trees, and Ways of Going Home, which was awarded the Altazor Prize, selected by The National Book Council as the best Chilean novel published during 2012, and won an English Pen Award. He was selected as one of Granta‘s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá39 list.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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Rachel Cusk & Siemon Scamell-Katz on Writing, Painting and the Vanishing Sublime

6 april 2022 | 85 min

In this special double episode we welcome dear friends of the bookshop Rachel Cusk and Siemon Scamell-Katz. First up is a conversation between Rachel Cusk and Adam Biles about her extraordinary recent novel Second Place, recorded in March in front of a small in store audience. Then, the podcast decamps 28 rue Saint Gille, where Siemon Scamell-Katz’s transcendent exhibition La fin de l’alterité (The End of Otherness), runs until April the 16th. There, Adam talks with Siemon about his exhibition, and both Rachel and Siemon about Quarry, their newly published collaboration for Sylph Editions Cahier Series.

Find out more about Siemon Scamell-Katz’s La fin de l’alterité here: https://siemonscamell-katz.com

Follow Siemon Scamell-Katz on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/siemon_scamell.katz/?hl=en

Buy Second Place here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571366699/second-place-longlisted-for-the-booker-prize-2021

Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline Trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and non-fiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow. She lives in Paris.

Siemon Scamell-Katz is a contemporary painter living and working between Norfolk and Paris. His practice is based on an understanding of the way humans see, an understanding he uses to create abstract paintings in oil and enamel on aluminium.

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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📘🎸Special Episode: Music for Ulysses with Alex Freiman🎸📘

1 april 2022 | 36 min

In this special episode, we’re joined by Parisian jazz musician Alex Freiman, to discuss the process of composing the theme music for Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses

Hear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Follow Alex Freiman on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/

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All episodes of our Ulysses podcast are free and available to everyone. However, if you want to be the first to hear the recordings, by subscribing, you can now get early access to recordings of complete sections.

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In addition a subscription gets you access to regular bonus episodes of our author interview podcast. All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit.

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Discover more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com

Buy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulysses

Find out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/home

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Find out more about him here: https://www.adambiles.net

Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Dr. Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the School of Collective Intelligence at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco.

Original music & sound design by Alex Freiman.

Hear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Follow Alex Freiman on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/

Featuring Flora Hibberd on vocals.

Hear more of Flora Hibberd here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5EFG7rqfVfdyaXiRZbRkpS

Visit Flora Hibberd's website: This is my website:florahibberd.com and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/florahibberd/

Music production by Adrien Chicot.

Hear more from Adrien Chicot here: https://bbact.lnk.to/utco90/

Follow Adrien Chicot on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/adrienchicot/

Photo of Alex Freiman by Laurent Delhourme

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George Saunders on Reading Better, Writing Better, and Living Better

30 mars 2022 | 53 min

To mark the paperback release of George Saunders’s extraordinary reading and writing guide A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, we are delighted to release this conversation from last year—previously only available to Friends of Shakespeare and Company.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a literary masterclass on how to become both a better writer and reader, on what makes great stories work, and what they can tell us about how to live. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches each of these stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. For the process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes. Funny, frank, and rigorous, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ultimately shows how great fiction can change a person's life and become a benchmark of one's moral and ethical beliefs.

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George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the Premio Rezzori prize. Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize. He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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Memory, Guilt and the Hunt for a Nazi Fugitive with Philippe Sands

23 mars 2022 | 50 min

One way Philippe Sands has described his extraordinary new book The Ratline is as “a sort of Nazi love story”. While there is certainly a love-story between two Nazis at its heart—specifically the marriage of Otto and Charlotte Wachter—The Ratline is so much more than that. It’s an investigation into the escape routes used by high-ranking German officials after the end of the Second World War, that reads at times, like a spy-thriller. It’s a study of memory, responsibility and guilt. It’s an examination of the self-deception that filial duty can engender. And it’s an exploration of the geopolitical, ideological and historical fault-lines that are still making themselves felt, and horrendously so, today.

Buy The Ratline here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474608145/the-ratline-love-lies-and-justice-on-the-trail-of-a-nazi-fugitive

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Philippe Sands is an international lawyer and, since 2018, the president of English PEN. He is a frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC World Service. In 2003 he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel. He lives in London.

Follow Philippe on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/philippesands

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Global Disorder and the road to war in Ukraine, with Helen Thompson

16 mars 2022 | 66 min

As its title suggests, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a book about the many and varied crises our world is facing. However by tracing the roots of these crises back over decades rather than years, and by focussing less on the political or economic shocks themselves, and more on the systemic and cross-continental fault lines that allowed for and amplified these shocks, Disorder, acts as a welcome antidote the short-termism and parochial thinking that has come to define a lot of political analysis.

And while Disorder may not make the crises we face any less frightening, it certainly makes them far less confusing, and that is a source of a certain relief in itself.

Buy Disorder here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780198864981/disorder-hard-times-in-the-21st-century

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. She is the author of Oil and the western economic crisis (2017); China and the mortgaging of America (2010); and Might, right, prosperity and consent: representative democracy and the international economy (2008). Since 2015, Helen has been a regular contributor to the podcast Talking Politics and has written articles for the London Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Financial Times.

Follow Helen on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/HelenHet20

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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On the Pleasures (and Pains) of Rereading, with Rob Doyle

9 mars 2022 | 54 min

We speak with novelist Rob Doyle about his new book Autobibliography in which he recounts a year spent rereading 52 books. Detailing the memories the books unearthed and the impact they had on him Autobibliography is a fascinating insight into the apprenticeship of one of our most exciting young novelists and a full-throated, although not unambiguous celebration of the power of literature.

Buy Autobibliography here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781800750524/autobibliography

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle has adapted it for a film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle's collection of short stories, This is the Ritual, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Doyle is the editor of the The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. He teaches on the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Limerick, and lives the rest of the year in Berlin.

Follow Rob on Twitter here: @RobDoyle1

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Dostoyevsky, the Parisian murderer, and the creation of a masterpiece, with Kevin Birmingham

2 mars 2022 | 57 min

In The Sinner and the Saint, Kevin Birmingham deftly unpicks the personal, societal, historical and philosophical forces that led Fyodor Dostoyeksky—isolated, indebted, beset by epileptic seizures—to take up his pen in the summer of 1865 and begin writing Crime and Punishment, and shows how it’s impossible to understand the invention of Rasklonikov without also getting to grips with the mind of a French murderer-poet who charmed and outraged Parisian society, in almost equal measure, three decades earlier—the notorious Pierre François Lacenaire.

Buy The Sinner and the Saint here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241235942/the-sinner-and-the-saint-dostoevsky-a-crime-and-its-punishment

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Kevin Birmingham is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book, which won the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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An insider’s history of Rock & Roll, with Lenny Kaye

23 februari 2022 | 68 min

Poetry, class, and radical performance, with Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen

16 februari 2022 | 55 min

Back in November, Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen dropped by the bookshop for a reading and a chat. The conversation touched on poetry, class, adapting the Greeks, artistic cross-pollination, the perks of being Scottish writer, and how midwives are the toughest crowd of all . . .

Buy Slug here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780349726366/slug-the-sunday-times-bestseller

Buy Oyster here:

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Hollie McNish is a poet, writer and spoken word artist based between Cambridge and Glasgow. She has published four collections of poetry, and a poetic memoir on politics and new parenthood, Nobody Told Me (2016), which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and has been translated into German, French and Spanish. McNish’s latest book is a cross-genre collection of poetry, memoir and short stories, Slug, and other things I've been told to hate, as is her forthcoming collection, Lobster. McNish, whose themes include breast-feeding, motherhood, immigration and women in sport, has a Master’s degree in Economics and no drama training. She gave her first live poetry reading at basement open mic night in Covent Garden, London, has since performed worldwide, and was crowned 2009’s UK Slam poetry champion. Among many activities, McNish runs Page to Performance, which delivers spoken word workshops and poetry slams to schools and other audiences.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author. His second collection, Oyster, was published in 2017 and was illustrated by and performed as a live show with Scott Hutchison (of Scottish band Frightened Rabbit). Pedersen has been named one of Canongate’s Future 40; was a finalist for the 2018 Writer of the Year at the Herald Scottish Culture Awards; was awarded the 2014 John Mather Trust Rising Star of Literature Award; and won a 2015 Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Pedersen also co-founded Neu! Reekie!, a prize-winning arts collective that has produced cutting-edge shows around the world for over ten years.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Valentine's Special Love, Language and London with Xiaolu Guo

10 februari 2022 | 47 min

For the Valentine’s week episode of our podcast, we were joined by Xiaolu Guo to discuss her intense, fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, A Lover’s Discourse.

Buy A Lover’s Discourse here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781529112481/a-lovers-discourse

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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A Chinese woman comes to post-Brexit London to start over - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch.

Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build their future together.

Playing with language and the cultural differences that our narrator encounters as she settles into her new life, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.

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Xiaolu Guo was born in south China. She studied at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before moving to London in 2002. Her books include Village of Stone which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and I Am China which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the Jhalak Prize and the Rathbones Folio Award 2018, and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.

In 2013 Xiaolu was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She has directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese, and documentaries about China and Britain. She was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2019, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Comedy and the Culture Wars, with Andrew Hankinson

3 februari 2022 | 64 min

This week’s guest is Andrew Hankinson, author of the brilliant Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.), a book about three things:

1. A room called the Comedy Cellar.

2. Who gets to speak in that room.

3. What they get to say.

Buy Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781911617686/dont-applaud-either-laugh-or-dont-at-the-comedy-cellar

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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The Comedy Cellar is a tiny basement club in New York's Greenwich Village. Run according to the principles of its owners, the Dworman family, it became a safe place for stand-ups to take risks and experiment. Superstar comedians such as Amy Schumer, Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart, and Louis CK became regulars, celebrities started to hang out, the club hosted debates, and everyone was encouraged to argue at its back table. Then the Comedy Cellar ended up on the frontline of the global culture war.

Andrew Hankinson speaks to the Cellar's owner, comedians, and audience members, using interviews, emails, podcasts, letters, text messages, and previously private documents to create a conversation about who gets to speak and what they get to say, and why. Moving backwards in time from Louis CK's downfall to when Manny Dworman used to host folk singers including Bob Dylan, this is about a comedy club, but it's also about the widening cultural chasm.

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Andrew Hankinson is a journalist who was born, raised, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, northern England. He started his career at Arena magazine and is now a freelance feature writer who has contributed to publications including GQ, The Observer, The Guardian, and Wired. His first book, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], won the CWA Non-Fiction Prize in 2016.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Patrick Hastings, The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses

29 januari 2022 | 63 min

In anticipation of the first episode of Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses this Wednesday, we were delighted to talk to former S&Co tumbleweed Patrick Hastings, and the creator of UlyssesGuide.com, about The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, his essential companion to this modernist classic.Buy The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781421443492/the-guide-to-james-joyces-ulysses*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR EARLY EPISODES AND BONUS FEATURESAll episodes of Friends of Shakespeare Read Ulysses are free and available to everyone. However, if you want to be the first to hear the recordings, by subscribing, you can now get early access to recordings of complete sections.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=enSubscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandcoSubscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandcoIn addition, if you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, a subscription gets you access to regular bonus episodes of the bookshop's interview podcast. All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.*Discover more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.comBuy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulyssesFind out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/homeAdam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeHear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Follow him on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/Hear more of Flora Hibberd here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5EFG7rqfVfdyaXiRZbRkpSHear more from Adrien Chicot here: https://bbact.lnk.to/utco90/Follow him on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/adrienchicot/ Get bonus content on Patreon

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Nadifa Mohamed on The Fortune Men

27 januari 2022 | 53 min

This week’s guest is Booker-shortlisted Nadifa Mohamed discussing The Fortune Men a gripping fictional portrayal of a real miscarriage of justice in 1950s Cardiff.Buy The Fortune Men here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241466940/the-fortune-men-shortlisted-for-the-costa-novel-of-the-year-awardBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURESIf you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including: An initiation into the world of rare book collecting; The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles; Handpicked classic interviews from our archive; And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandcoSubscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandcoSubscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=enAll money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.*Mahmood Mattan is a fixture in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustles with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He is a father, chancer, some-time petty thief. He is many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn't too worried. It is true that he has been getting into trouble more often since his Welsh wife Laura left him. But Mahmood is secure in his innocence in a country where, he thinks, justice is served. It is only in the run-up to the trial, as the prospect of freedom dwindles, that it will dawn on Mahmood that he is in a terrifying fight for his life - against conspiracy, prejudice and the inhumanity of the state. And, under the shadow of the hangman's noose, he begins to realise that the truth may not be enough to save him.*Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, in 1981 and moved to Britain at the age of four. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize; it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. Her second novel, Orchard of Lost Souls, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. Nadifa Mohamed was selected for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Nadifa Mohamed lives in London.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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Introducing Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses

20 januari 2022 | 1 min

Rebecca Solnit on Orwell’s Roses

20 januari 2022 | 62 min

Our guest this week is the wonderful Rebecca Solnit discussing Orwell’s Roses, her fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.

Buy Orwell’s Roses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783788620/orwells-roses

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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From 1936 to 1940, the newly-wed George Orwell lived in a small cottage inHertfordshire, writing, and tending his garden. When Rebecca Solnit visited the cottage, she discovered the descendants of the roses that he had planted many decades previously. These survivors, as well as the diaries he kept of his planting and growing, provide a springboard for a fresh look at Orwell's motivations and drives -and the optimism that countered his dystopian vision - and open up a profound mediation on our relationship to plants, trees and the natural world.

Tracking Orwell's impact on political thought over the last century, Solnit journeys toEngland and Russia, Mexico and Colombia, exploring the political and historical events that shaped Orwell's life and her own. From a history of roses to discussions of climate change and insights into structural inequalities in contemporary society, Orwell's Roses is a fresh reading of a towering figure of 20th century literary and political life, which finds optimism, solace and solutions to our 21st century world.

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Rebecca Solnit is author of, among other books, Call Them By Their True Names, The Mother of All Questions, Men Explain Things to Me, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC award-winning River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. A contributing editor to Harper’s, she writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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A Parisian bus ride with Lauren Elkin

13 januari 2022 | 46 min

For our first podcast of 2022 we leave the bookshop and take to the buses of Paris for a conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute.

Buy No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781838014186/no-9192-notes-on-a-parisian-commute

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people.

Lauren Elkin is a Franco-American writer and translator. Her last book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her translation, with Charlotte Mandell, of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau, won the 2017 French-American Foundation's Translation Prize. Her next book, Art Monsters: on Beauty and Excess, is to be published by Chatto & Windus. She currently lives in London, with her partner and son.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Get bonus content on Patreon

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Claire Messud on A Dream Life

30 december 2021 | 49 min

BONUS: Cerys Matthews reads A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas

24 december 2021 | 9 min

Sarah Hall on Burntcoat

23 december 2021 | 59 min

Welcome to Shakespeare and Company: Writers, Books and Paris

16 december 2021 | 1 min

Aysegül Savas on White on White

16 december 2021 | 48 min

This week Aysegül Savaş joined Adam live in our writer’s studio to discuss White on White, her book about art and artists, parents and their children, beauty and class, as well as the quest for perfection and the compromises we make in pursuit of it. White on White was called "marvelous" by Lauren Groff and "gentle, mysterious and profound” by Marina Abramović.

Buy White on White here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780593330517/white-on-white-a-novel

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.

In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.

What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.

White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.

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Ayşegül Savaş is the author of Walking on the Ceiling. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Philip Hoare on Albert & the Whale

9 december 2021 | 58 min

This week Philip Hoare discusses Albert & the Whale his dive into the mind of Albrecht Durer, one of the most well-known yet mysterious of artists. Mysterious because he lived at that fluid time, in the fifteenth century, where history and legend often blend into one. Mysterious because his works feel so replete with meaning and yet prove so hard to interpret. And mysterious because his skills were so advanced, his genius so profound, that his techniques are hard to replicate even more than five centuries later.

'This is a wonderful book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world' Patti Smith

Buy Albert & the Whale here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780008323295/albert-and-the-whale

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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Albrecht Durer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse - the first works mass produced by any artist - to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly powerful and seductive, even now.

In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Durer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Durer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us?

With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, Albert & the Whale offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.

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Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim.

An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Lauren Groff on Matrix

2 december 2021 | 54 min

This week Adam is joined by Lauren Groff, whose latest novel Matrix an extraordinary story of transformation, visions, leaps of faith, vicious battles, friendship, and creativity, as well as — to cite USA Today — “a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell”. Matrix is a true original, unlike any literary experience you will have this year, probably one of the many reasons for which it was selected as a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award.Buy Matrix here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781785151910/matrix-the-new-york-times-bestsellerBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Seventeen-year-old Marie, too wild for courtly life, is thrown to the dogs one winter morning, expelled from the royal court to become the prioress of an abbey. Marie is strange - tall, a giantess, her elbows and knees stick out, ungainly.  At first taken aback by life at the abbey, Marie finds purpose and passion among her mercurial sisters. Yet she deeply misses her secret lover Cecily and queen Eleanor.  Born last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, women who flew across the countryside with their sword fighting and dagger work, Marie decides to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. She will bring herself, and her sisters, out of the darkness, into riches and power.  MATRIX is a bold vision of female love, devotion and desire from one of the most adventurous writers at work today. *Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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Poets Richard Barnett and Luke Kennard in conversation

25 november 2021 | 56 min

This week Adam is joined by poets Richard Barnett and Luke Kennard. Richard Barnet’s WHEREVER WE ARE WHEN WE COME TO THE END is an imagining of the experience of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein in the First World War, recounted in the same austere and succinct statements as the philosopher’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, the initial notes for which were taken during the conflict. The result is an affecting examination of love, duty and violence that had such a strong impact on me that it sent me back to investigate Wittgenstein’s writing with fresh eyes. Sarah Bakewell called WHEREVER WE ARE WHEN WE COME TO THE END “ingenious, devastating and filled with emotional riches.”Luke Kennard’s NOTES ON THE SONNETS, revisits Shakespeare’s poetry in a chain of prose poems set in a British house party. The party is a contradictory beast—at once crushingly dull yet flecked with the absurd, at once sprawling yet intensely claustrophobic. Kennard’s poems embody these contradictions too, they somehow manage to be superficial yet profound, charmingly insolent yet glacially serious, knowingly pretentious yet deeply insecure and self-critical, and they take in almost every subject under the stars. NOTES ON THE SONNETS was a Poetry Book Society recommendation, and recently won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021.Buy WHEREVER WE ARE WHEN WE COME TO THE END here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781912436583/wherever-we-are-when-we-come-to-the-endBuy NOTES ON THE SONNETS here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781908058812/notes-on-the-sonnetsBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Richard Barnett is a poet and historian. He taught the history of science and medicine at Cambridge, UCL, and Oxford for more than a decade, and his history books include Medical London, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and The Sick Rose, an international bestseller.His ﬁrst poetry collection Seahouses was published by Valley Press in 2015, and was short-listed for the Poetry Business Prize. His next poetry publication was Wherever We Are When We Come to the End, a poetic experiment digging into the form and language of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, published in May 2021.Luke Kennard has published five collections of poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. He lectures at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of the Next Generation Poets. His debut novel, The Transition, is published in 2017 by Fourth Estate.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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Katharina Volckmer on The Appointment

18 november 2021 | 55 min

Armando Iannucci on Pandemonium

10 november 2021 | 37 min

This week Adam Biles is joined by comedy-legend Armando Iannucci to discuss Pandemonium, his riotously funny, but also deeply affecting mock-epic about the mistakes made and palms-greased during the British government’s handling of the pandemic.Buy Pandemonium here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781408715086/pandemonium-some-verses-on-the-current-predicamentBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Tell, Mighty Wit, how the highest in forethought and,That tremendous plus, The Science,Saw off our panic and Globed vexationUntil a drape of calmness furled around the earthAnd beckoned a new and greater normal into each lifeFor which we give plenty gratitude and payWillingly for the vict'ry triumphMerited by these wisest gods.Pandemonium is an epic mock-heroic poem, written in response to the pandemic with all the anger and wit that Armando Iannucci brings to his vision of contemporary events. It tells the story of how Orbis Rex, Young Matt and his Circle of Friends, Queen Dido and the blind Dom'nic did battle with 'a wet and withered bat' from Wuhan.*Armando Iannucci is a writer and broadcaster who has written, directed and produced numerous critically acclaimed films, television and radio comedy shows.His screenplay for the film 'In The Loop' was nominated for an Oscar at the Academy Awards. His iconic series for the BBC – 'The Thick of It' – was nominated for 13 BAFTA Awards, winning 5 during its four series run. Among his own award-winning shows, he is also the co-creator and writer of the popular Steve Coogan character Alan Partridge.Armando's HBO comedy 'Veep' has picked up numerous awards, including four Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series over the last four years. His film adaptation of Charles Dickens' 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' was released in January 2020, which that year won Best Screenplay at BIFA, was also nominated for a Golden Globe and won a 'Seal of Distinction' from the US Critics' Choice Association.In 2017 he published 'Hear Me Out', a new book on classical music, and released the feature film 'The Death of Stalin', which was nominated for 2 BAFTAs and won Best Comedy at the European Film Awards. His latest HBO series, 'Avenue 5', which stars Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad, aired on SKY in January 2020, and is currently in production for the second series.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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Eimear McBride on Something Out of Place: Women and Disgust

4 november 2021 | 58 min

Richard Powers on Bewilderment

27 oktober 2021 | 62 min

Our guest this week is Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, discussing Bewilderment, his moving and visionary, Booker-shortlisted novel about a bereaved father and his neurodiverse son, their hunt for life on planets—both real and imaginary—and their attempts to convince others that life on our own planet is worth saving.Buy Bewilderment here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781785152634/bewilderment-shortlisted-for-the-booker-prize-2021Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Theo Byrne is a promising young scientist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son Robin is funny, loving and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from school for smashing his friend's face with a thermos.What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, all while fostering his son's desperate attempt to save this one.At the heart of Bewilderment lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?*Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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BONUS PODCAST* Poetry from Archipelago Books

23 oktober 2021 | 38 min

This special podcast is a collaboration with our friends at Archipelago books, showcasing three of their wonderful poetry titles: Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated by Nandana Dev Sen; Allegri by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Geoffrey Brock; And Until the Lions by Karthika Naïr.Buy Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated by Nandana Dev Sen here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781939810809/acrobatBuy Allegri by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Geoffrey Brock here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781939810649/allegriaBuy Until the Lions by Karthika Naïr here: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/until-the-lions-echoes-from-the-mahabharata/*Famed for his brevity, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction. These are the kinds of poems that, through their numinous clarity and shifting intimations, can make a poetry-lover of the most stone-faced non-believer. Ungaretti won multiple prizes for his poetry, including the 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He was a major proponent of the Hermetic style, which proposed a poetry in which the sounds of words were of equal import to their meanings. This auditory awareness echoes through Brock’s hair-raising translations, where a man holding vigil with his dead, open-mouthed comrade, says, “I have never felt / so fastened / to life.”*A radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic that together evokes the arc of an ordinary life. Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s rhythmic lines explore the joys and agonies of first love, childbirth, and decay with a restless, tactile imagination, both picking apart and celebrating the rituals that make us human. When she warns, “know that blood can be easily drawn by lips,” her words tune to the fierce and biting depths of language, to the “treachery that lingers on tongue tips.” At once compassionate and unsparing, conversational and symphonic, these poems tell of a rope shivering beneath an acrobat’s nimble feet or of a twisted, blood-soaked umbilical cord – they pluck the invisible threads that bind us together.*A dazzling and eloquent reworking of the Mahabharata, the ancient Asian epic, through nineteen voices on the periphery. With daring poetic forms, Karthika Naïr breathes life into this ancient epic.In Until the Lions, Karthika Naïr retells the Mahabharata through the embodied voices of women and marginal characters, so often conquered and destroyed throughout history. She captures the richness and complexity of the Mahabharata, while illuminating lives buried beneath the edifices of one of the world’s most venerated books. Through shifting poetic forms, ranging from pantoums to Petrarchan sonnets, Naïr choreographs the cadences of stray voices. And with a passionate empathy, she tells of nameless soldiers, their despairing spouses and lovers, a canny empress, an all-powerful god, and a gender-shifting outcast warrior. Until the Lions is a kaleidoscopic, poetic tour de force. It reveals the most intimate threads of desire, greed, and sacrifice in this foundational epic.*Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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David Runciman on Confronting Leviathan

20 oktober 2021 | 68 min

This week Adam Biles is joined by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and the presenter of the hugely popular Talking Politics podcast. David's new book Confronting Leviathan is a compelling and accessible introduction to some of the most important and radical thinkers (Wolstonecraft, Constant, De Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Hayek, MacKinnon, Fukuyama and more…) whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the modern state.Buy Confronting Leviathan here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781788167826/confronting-leviathan-a-history-of-ideasBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Based on the History Of Ideas podcast series by Talking Politics host David Runciman, A History of Ideas explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics - from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, and from revolution to lock down. While explaining the most important and often-cited ideas of thinkers such as Constant, De Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Hayek, MacKinnon and Fukuyama, David Runciman shows how crises - revolutions, wars, depressions, pandemics - generated these new ways of political thinking. This is a history of ideas to help make sense of what's happening today.*David Runciman is Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and the presenter of the popular Talking Politics podcast. He is the author of many books about politics, including The Politics of Good Intentions (2006), Political Hypocrisy (2008) and The Confidence Trap (2013). He writes regularly about politics and current affairs for a wide range of publications including the London Review of Books.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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Anuk Arudpragasam on A Passage North

13 oktober 2021 | 54 min

Ian Dunt on How to Be a Liberal

6 oktober 2021 | 62 min

Leïla Slimani on The Country of Others

29 september 2021 | 58 min

This week we’re joined by the brilliant Leïla Slimani to discuss The Country of Others, her immensely readable, deeply moving, Steinbeckian family drama set against the grand sweep of Moroccan and French history.Buy The Country of Others here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571361625/the-country-of-othersBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Alsace, 1944. Mathilde finds herself falling deeply in love with Amine Belhaj, a Moroccan soldier, billeted in her town, fighting for the French. After the Liberation, Mathilde leaves France, following Amine to Morocco. But life here is unrecognizable to this brave and passionate young woman. Where she she once danced, bickered with her sister, her life is now that of a farmer's wife - with all the sacrifices and vexations that brings.Suffocated by the heat, by her loneliness on the farm, by the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner and by the lack of money Mathilde grows restless. As Morocco's own struggle for independence grows daily, Mathilde and Amine find themselves caught in the crossfire . . .This story of two nations at war, two cultures at loggerheads, and one family torn apart is as tenderly observed as it is devastatingly true*Leïla Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, which she won for Lullaby. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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Tom McCarthy on The Making of Incarnation

22 september 2021 | 60 min

Claire-Louise Bennett on Checkout 19

15 september 2021 | 74 min

David Keenan on Monument Maker

8 september 2021 | 54 min

Elif Shafak on The Island of Missing Trees

1 september 2021 | 53 min

Pola Oloixarac and John Freeman, in conversation

12 augusti 2021 | 58 min

As the S&Co podcast takes its summer break for a few weeks, we leave you with this fascinating and funny conversation between Pola Oloixarac and John Freeman, recorded on the bookshop terrace on 19th July. Many thanks to John, Pola and the NYU Creative Writing Program for making this very special evening possible.*Buy Pola Oloixarac’s books here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/search?q=Pola+Oloixarac&type=booksBuy John Freeman’s There's a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780593314692/theres-a-revolution-outside-my-love-letters-from-a-crisisBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Pola Oloixarac was born in Buenos Aires, where she studied Philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She's the author of the novels Savage Theories, Dark Constellations and Mona. She's the recipient of the 2020 Eccles Centre Prize, and was named one of Granta Best of Young Spanish Novelists in 2010. Her pieces about culture and politics have appeared in The New York Times, BBC and La Nación, where she writes a political column. She lives in Barcelona.John Freeman is the founder of Freeman's and an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. The author and editor of ten books, his work includes the anthologies Tales of Two Planets and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story; a book-length essay, Dictionary of the Undoing, and two collections of poems; Maps and The Park. His most recent book, co-edited with Tracy K. Smith, is There's a Revolution Outside My Love. He is Artist in Residence at NYU.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon

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Katie Kitamura on Intimacies

5 augusti 2021 | 37 min

Jakuta Alikavazovic on Night As It Falls

28 juli 2021 | 38 min

Laurent Binet on Civilisations

21 juli 2021 | 56 min

Eliot Higgins on We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People

14 juli 2021 | 60 min

Pragya Agarwal on (M)otherhood

7 juli 2021 | 58 min

Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan on Francis Bacon: Revelations

30 juni 2021 | 70 min

Jennifer Lucy Allan on The Foghorn's Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast

23 juni 2021 | 58 min

Hari Kunzru on Red Pill

16 juni 2021 | 60 min

Rob Doyle and Rachel Kushner in conversation

10 juni 2021 | 64 min

We were joined by two of the most radical and exciting voices in anglophone literature, Rob Doyle and Rachel Kushner, for a discussion of art, class, truth and how much of a ‘sick puppy’ Georges Bataille really was.Buy Rob Doyle’s Threshold here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781526607089/thresholdBuy Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781787333109/the-hard-crowdBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award. She grew up in San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles.Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle has adapted it for a film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle's collection of short stories, This is the Ritual, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Doyle is the editor of the The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. He teaches on the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Limerick, and lives the rest of the year in Berlin.Follow Rob on Twitter here: @RobDoyle1*Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time Get bonus content on Patreon

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Niven Govinden & Musa Okwonga in conversation

27 maj 2021 | 63 min

Ece Temelkuran on Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now

13 maj 2021 | 53 min

Rosa Rankin-Gee on Dreamland

6 maj 2021 | 49 min

Jenni Fagan and Salena Godden in conversation with Adam Biles

29 april 2021 | 58 min

We’re back! Welcome to the relaunched S&Co podcast. For the first episode after a long hiatus, we were thrilled to be joined (remotely!) by Jenni Fagan and Salena Godden to discuss their formally inventive and thematically bold new novels LUCKENBOOTH and MRS DEATH MISSES DEATH. Hosted by Adam Biles.Buy LUCKENBOOTH here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780434023318/luckenboothBuy MRS DEATH MISSES DEATH here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781838851194/mrs-death-misses-deathBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Jenni Fagan was born in Scotland. She graduated from Greenwich University and won a scholarship to the Royal Holloway MFA programme. She has just completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. A published poet and novelist, she has won awards from Creative Scotland, Dewar Arts, Scottish Screen and Scottish Book Trust among others, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jenni was selected as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists after the publication of her debut novel, The Panopticon, which was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. Her adaptation of The Panopticon was staged by the National Theatre of Scotland to great acclaim. The Sunlight Pilgrims, her second novel, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award and the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award, and saw her win Scottish Author of the Year at the Herald Culture Awards. She lives in Edinburgh with her son.Follow Jenni on Twitter: @Jenni_FaganSalena Godden is one of Britain’s best loved poets and performers. She is also an activist, broadcaster, memoirist and essayist and is widely anthologised. She has published several volumes of poetry, the latest of which was Pessimism is for Lightweights, and a literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road.Mrs Death Misses Death is her debut novel. A BBC Radio 4 documentary following Godden’s progress on the novel over twelve months was broadcast in 2018. In November 2020 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Follow Salena on Twitter: @salenagoddenVisit Salena’s website: www.salenagodden.co.ukAdam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time Get bonus content on Patreon

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An extract from Pond, read by Claire-Louise Bennett

17 september 2020 | 36 min

Renga through a Lockdown with Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr

4 augusti 2020 | 22 min

We were delighted to welcome Karthika Naïr and Marilyn Hacker back to the bookshop. During lockdown, Marilyn and Karthika began writing Renga — a collaborative form of Japanese poetry — to each other, building up a beautiful and compelling body of work that engages with both the micro and the macro of this unprecedented moment. This meeting was the first time that these close friends had been in the same room as each other for several months, and their readings ring with the sorrow of separation but also the joy of rediscovery.*Renga through a Lockdown: Shortly after France declared a full lockdown in March 2020, Marilyn Hacker invited Karthika Naïr to join her in creating a renga. Renga, literally “linked poem”, is the ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, which has evolved a little through the ages. Poets take turns to compose alternating tanka (5-7-5 and 7-7 syllabled-lines in the stanza) and each poet begins their opening line with word/s or idea/s from the preceding poem. Marilyn and Karthika’s renga are chronicles of their daily lives through the months of lockdown, triggered as much by immediate experiences in Paris as by echoes and concerns from friends and family in the US, Lebanon, India and elsewhere. And while both live in Paris, the distance between their homes (one in the 3rd arrondissement, the other in the 10th) - usually one of a few miles - seemed to multiply in this new world, with neighbourhoods transforming into distinct, new, terrain. If you’d like to see a video of some of these readings, keep an eye on the social media of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival.*Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Blazons ( 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror(2015) , a book of essays, Unauthorized Voices (2010), a collaborative book, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (2014) and seventeen books of translations of French and Francophone poets, most recently Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (2020). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris. Find more of Marilyn’s work here:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marilyn-hackerKarthika Naïr is the author of several books, including The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. She has helmed the scripts of several dance productions, such as the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), Akram Khan’s dance solo. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining in verse of the Mahabharata, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals across the world, including Granta, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Magazine, Indian Literature, The Wolf, and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. She is a 2012 Sangam House Fellow, a 2013 Toji Foundation Fellow and was awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015. Her latest book is the collaborative Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (2018), a travelogue in verse, written with Sampurna Chattarji, and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet and Roshni Vyam.Find more of Karthika’s work here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150393/remaindering-habitsAnd here:https://www.danceumbrella.co.uk/2017/08/29/six-degrees-otherness-part-2/ Get bonus content on Patreon

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Lindsey Tramuta on The New Parisienne

17 juli 2020 | 68 min

John Freeman reads from The Park

1 juni 2020 | 23 min

The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Discover your next favourite book, or take a deep dive into the mind of an author you love, with The Shakespeare and Company Interview podcast.

Om podden

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BONUS: Lauren Elkin on Scaffolding (in conversation with Amanda Dennis)

Colombe Schneck on The Paris Trilogy (with Translator Natasha Lehrer)

Lynne Tillman on American History, Human Absurdity, and why Trump should have become a Comedian

Ayşegül Savaş on Love, Rootlessness, and “The Age of Poetry”

On the State of the (Book)World, with Lauren Groff and Neel Mukherjee (live in Edinburgh)

Rachel Kushner on Creation Lake (Booker Prize SHORTLIST 2024)

Ferdia Lennon on Glorious Exploits

Roxy Dunn on As Young As This

Poetry: Ishion Hutchinson reads from and discusses School of Instructions

Michael Donkor on Grow Where They Fall

Writing Against Normality, with Samanta Schweblin

Parenting in the age of AI, with Helen Phillips

Creating Life from Art, with Catherine Lacey

Paul Murray on The Bee Sting

Claire Kilroy on Parenting under the Patriarchy

Rachel Cusk on Art, Violence and Freedom through Destruction

When Radical Art meets Obscene Wealth, with Hari Kunzru

Sheila Heti on Alphabetical Diaries

BONUS: Celebrating Dylan Thomas with Cerys Matthews…with exclusive live music from Flora Hibberd!

Viet Thanh Nguyen on Memory, Migration and Model Minorities

Ottessa Moshfegh on bringing Eileen to the screen

Percival Everett on James, his subversive reimagining of Huckleberry Finn

On Allen Ginsberg: His life, his work and his archives, with Pat Thomas and Peter Hale

Bidding adieu to Freeman’s literary journal, with Jakuta Alikavazovic, Deborah Landau, Juan Gabriel Vazquez, and John Freeman

On Friendship, with Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen

Love in the Time of Creative-Writing Classes, with Brandon Taylor

Annabelle Hirsch, A History of Women in 101 Objects

☕Proust Questionnaire: Holly McNish & Michael Pedersen☕

BLOOMCAST | HOLIDAY SPECIAL | THE DEAD

😱On Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed, with Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Adam Thirlwell😱

👭🏼Naomi Klein on Doppelgangers, Conspiracy Theories, and the Shadowlands we all inhabit…👭🏼

Claire-Louise Bennett on Nightflowers, her immersive installation at Museum of Literature Ireland

🥘On Eating through the Endtimes, with C Pam Zhang🥘

🐕On Life, Art and the Line Between the Two, with Jo Ann Beard🐕

👁️Sandra Newman on Julia, her re-imagining of George Orwell’s 1984 👁️

⛵Bidding adieu to a literary journal, with John Freeman (Feat. readings from Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Rebecca Makkai, and Mieko Kawakami read by translator Hitomi Yoshio)⛵

🛏️On Not Sleeping, with Marie Darrieussecq🛏️

🐖On Populism, Post-Truth, and Piggybacking George Orwell. Adam Biles in conversation with Rob Doyle.🐖

💎Sunday Poetry: Emilie Moorhouse reads from Emerald Wounds, her new translation of the poems of Joyce Mansour💎

🧠On Making Sense of a Murderer, with Mark O’Connell🧠

🗞️On Power, Pamphlets, Parties and Possible Worlds, with Adam Thirlwell🗞️

🪄On the KLF, Conspiracies, and Chaos with John Higgs🪄

Sunday Poetry: Nick Laird reads from Up Late

On Writing, Wormholes, and Wasted Opportunities, with Isabel Waidner

🏫On writing and translating The Topeka School, with Ben Lerner and Jakuta Alikavazovic🏫

🏇On Blood, Sweat and Racetracking, with Kathryn Scanlan🏇

BONUS: Lex Paulson on Cicero and the Future of Democracy

Hernan Diaz on his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, Trust

Proust Questionnaire: Dolly Alderton!

Leïla Slimani on Inheritance, Hippies and the Literature of Disappointment

BONUS: Martin Amis in conversation with Will Self (2010)

On Anti-Memoir, the Weird, and New Kinds of Disaster, with M. John Harrison

On Unclassifiable Books and Uncategorisable Lives, with Xiaolu Guo

How Westminster Works . . . and Why it Doesn’t, with Ian Dunt

✖️On Art, Alternative Histories, and the Arbitrariness of Life with Catherine Lacey✖️

📚How to Resist Amazon and Why, with Danny Caine📚

On Old Wounds, Finding Peace, and Returning Home, with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

🗺️On Sarajevo, Multiple Worlds and History at the Fringes, with Aleksandar Hemon🗺️

❤️‍🔥Valentine’s Special: Meena Kandasamy on The Book of Desire❤️‍🔥

On Parents, Grief and the difference between Fiction and Memoir, with Elizabeth McCracken

🎸Music, Sugar and other Obsessions, with Don Paterson🎸

📚Books of the Year📚

👩‍🎨Katy Hessel on The Story of Art Without Men👩‍🎨

📘BLOOMCAST | HOLIDAY SPECIAL📘

🔥Sarah Churchwell on Gone with the Wind, January 6th, and the Lies America Tells🔥

🔔Hunchback of Notre-Dame Special! 🔔

🐋How to Speak to Whales (and other animals…) with Tom Mustill🐋

💋On Love, Loss and Life in New York, with Coco Mellors💋

On Writing the Queer, Indigenous Experience with Billy-Ray Belcourt

🍫Jonathan Coe on Bournville🍫

🍄Psychedelic Storytelling, DIY Magick, and the New Masculinity, with David Keenan🍄

🥊 Miriam Toews on Sweary Matriarchs, the Absurdity of Life, and the Human Imperative to Experience Joy🥊

🎤 Sunday Poetry: Mark Polizzotti reads his new translations of Arthur Rimbaud🎤

🎈William Boyd, The Romantic🎈

🏅BONUS: Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize in Literature🏅

🐴💰On Friendship and Redemption in the time of the Gold Rush, with Paddy Crewe💰🐴

Valentine's Special Love, Language and London with Xiaolu Guo