The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Wish I Was Here—the new book by today’s guest M. John Harrison—is a work which resists description. Monique Roffey goes for “a deep dive into the back-and-forth, up-down sideways mind of a true genius”, Helen Macdonald plumps for “an archaeology of fragments that shivers with wholeness” while Jonathan Coe turns interrogative, asking “Is it a memoir? Is it a handbook for writers?” However the book may best be described—if the book may best be described—the fact that it appeals to writers as diverse as Coe, Roffey and Macdonald—not to mention William Gibson, who described Wish I Was Here as “hilarious and haunting”—shows not just the range of minds that M. John Harrison appeals to, but also the pervasive, if ineffable, nature of his concerns.Buy Wish I Was Here here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5998501/harrison-m-john-wish-i-was-hereM. John Harrison is the author of, among others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Prize (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light), the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing) and the Goldsmiths Prize (The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again). He lives in Shropshire.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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Like all of Xiaolu Guo’s work RADICAL is difficult to describe because it’s difficult to categorise. It might be called a memoir, but it’s form makes it unlike any memoir readers may have encountered before. It’s also a fascinating reflection on language, on literature, on memory, on vagrancy, on art, on nature and on what makes a home. But perhaps the central circle in this Venn diagram of concerns is “love”, it’s different forms, how it arrives, what it does to us, and how it fares under imposed separation.Buy Radical here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7669745/guo-xiaolu-radicalXiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include: Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin.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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn’t Ian Dunt blows the cobwebs out of the arcane nooks and crannies of the British political system, demystifying it with his clear, compelling, and entertaining prose. He also shines a light upon how the system as it stands does not, in fact, work and, indeed, is often designed not to work. How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn’t leaves the reader feeling more knowledgable—as you would hope—but also angrier and more energised, more equipped to engage, to argue and perhaps even to change things for the better.Buy How Westminster Works . . . and Why it Doesn’t: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7436384/dunt-ian-how-westminster-works-and-why-it-doesn-tIan Dunt spent many years working in the heart of Westminster as editor of Politics.co.uk. He is a columnist for the i newspaper, host on the Oh God What Now and Origin Story podcasts, and regularly appears as a political pundit on TV and radio. He is the author of two previous books – Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now and How to be a Liberal.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Pre-order his forthcoming novel, Beasts of England, here: https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paperback-shop/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Biography of X is one of the most intriguing, compelling and vertigo-inducing reads of recent years. Structured and referenced like a biography—written by one CM Lucca—the central contention of the book is Lucca’s quest to unearth the origins and influences of X, the celebrated artist known by a single letter. It also calls into question how much we — as biographers, as readers, as fans, as lovers — can ever really pin down “who” anybody is at all.Buy Biography of X here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7949265/lacey-catherine-biography-of-x*In addition to Biography of X, Catherine Lacey is the author of four books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States and Pew. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Vogue, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is a Granta Best of Young American Novelist, a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of the 2021 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction 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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode, Adam speaks to Danny Caine, owner of Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, and author of How to Resist Amazon and Why? an excoriating, enraging but ultimately empowering takedown of one of the world’s most powerful and damaging companies. Buy How to Resist Amazon and Why?: https://www.ravenbookstore.com/book/9781648411236*Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, ​Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the book How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, ​LitHub, DIAGRAM, HAD, and Barrelhouse, and his prose has appeared in LitHub and Publishers Weekly. The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association awarded him the 2019 Midwest Bookseller of the Year award. He's a co-owner of the Raven Book Store, Publishers Weekly's 2022 bookstore of the year. 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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All Your Children, Scattered by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse is about the lives lived by those in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Those who hid from it, those who fought against it, those who fled it, and those who were born into it. Telling the story of a family through the eyes of three generations—Blanche, her mother Immaculata, and her son Stokely—one of the many remarkable things about All Your Children, Scattered is how Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse is able to tell the story on a very human scale, without every overlooking the utterly monstrous and inhuman scale of the events. All Your Children, Scattered — translated by Alison Anderson — is, at its heart, a story about family, loss and the desire to return home — whatever “home” means.Buy All Your Children, Scattered: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7902877/umubyeyi-mairesse-beata-all-your-children-scattered*Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was born in Butare, Rwanda in 1979. Surviving the genocide against the Tutsis, she moved to France in 1994 to study political science and work for humanitarian causes. She is now an acclaimed novelist and poet.Alison Anderson is a literary translator and author of three novels, Hidden Latitudes, Darwin’s Wink and The Summer Guest. She has translated over thirty novels from French, including Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the works by Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio.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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel, The World and All That it Holds starts with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, and then takes us from Bosnia, to Uzbekistan, to China and elsewhere, covering a convulsive period of history in which the technological advances, the political turbulence, and the displacement of people bear striking similarities to those of our own time. At it’s heart, though—not exactly beneath the grand sweep, but entwined with it—is a love story between two men, Pinto and Osman, and a novel that never loses sight of the fact that within beneath History, there are humans living, humans loving, humans losing and, crucially, humans coming to understand the scale at which the decisions they make can count.Buy The World and All That it Holds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5273994/hemon-aleksandar-the-world-and-all-that-it-holds*Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo and lives in Chicago. He is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, and The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work also appears regularly in the New Yorker and Granta, among other publications.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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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/subscriptionsDancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6316982/kaminsky-ilya-dancing-in-odessaCleopatra and Frankenstein, Coco Mellors: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6416524/mellors-coco-cleopatra-and-frankensteinHarlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6461812/whitehead-colson-harlem-shuffleThe Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6433167/harris-nathan-the-sweetness-of-waterFrom a Low and Quiet Sea, Donal Ryan: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6871035/ryan-donal-from-a-low-and-quiet-seaTrespasses by Louise Kennedy: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6192095/louise-kennedy-kennedy-trespassesCormac McCarthy, The Passenger and Stella Maris: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5474563/mccarthy-cormac-the-passengerOpen Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6294505/nelson-caleb-azumah-open-waterBabel 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-babelThe Hummingbird, Sandro Veronesi: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6191021/veronesi-sandro-the-hummingbirdThe Queens of Sarmiento Park, Camila Sosa Villada: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6111567/villada-camila-sosa-the-queens-of-sarmiento-parkThe Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5227917/liu-cixin-the-three-body-problemA Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6951005/saunders-george-a-swim-in-a-pond-in-the-rainAgatha Christie, Lucy Worsley: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6007132/worsley-lucy-agatha-christieThe Storyteller, Dave Grohl: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6113617/grohl-dave-the-storytellerThe Naked Don't Fear the Water, Matthieu Aikins: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6088623/aikins-matthieu-the-naked-don-t-fear-the-waterThe Climate Book, Greta Thunberg: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7314067/thunberg-greta-the-climate-bookFight Night, Miriam Toews: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5994736/toews-miriam-fight-night*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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: *SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This December—six months after saying goodbye—Bloomcast is back for a Holiday Special! Join Alice, Lex and Adam as they answer your questions, play games, tease each other, drink (tea, whiskey, Gimber) and leap off Forty Foot and into Ulysses one more (one last?) time…*Bloomcast is a ten-part plunge into James Joyce's Ulysses presented by Adam Biles, Alice McCrum, and Lex Paulson, live from Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. Join them as they muddle through this radical, sublime, and often misunderstood novel first published one hundred years ago, in 1922.  Please share your thoughts on the book and anything you’d like to hear us discuss: [email protected] A student of environmental policy at Sciences Po-Paris, Alice McCrum runs programming at the American Library in Paris.  In between fits of Joycean nerdery, Dr. Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the School of Collective Intelligence at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco. An adopted Parisian, he teaches at Sciences Po-Paris and writes on the past and future of democracy. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, Paris. He is the author of the novel Feeding Time, available in French as Défense de nourrir les vieux. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

🔔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*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*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

**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-boatMark 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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

**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.Buy The Romantic: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7736567/boyd-william-the-romantic*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading **In October 2018 we were honoured to welcome Annie Ernaux to Shakespeare and Company. In conversation with Adam Biles (and interpreter Alice Heathwood), she discussed her masterpiece The Years. To celebrate Annie Ernaux being chosen as the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature we are releasing the recording of that evening as a bonus podcast today.Discover Annie Ernaux’s books here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/post/70/congratulations-to-annie-ernaux-on-winning-the-nobel-prize-for-literature*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes.Subscribe 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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

**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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

**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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

**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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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-poukahangatusIntimate, 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. *SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week's guest is Tess Gunty, winner of the 2022 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for her novel The Rabbit Hutch.*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.”*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is a book of large scope—spanning more than four centuries—and even larger ideas. In fewer than 300 pages we take in pandemics, time travel and colonialism—of both lunar and early-20th Century varieties. What keeps our feet on solid ground is Emily St John Mandel’s elegant, light-touch prose, her almost preternatural gift for spinning a story, and perhaps above all else the convincing, compassionately-told human stories at its core.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*Emily St. John Mandel was born in Canada and studied dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Her novels are Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun, The Lola Quartet, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. She lives in New York City.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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we’re joined by former diplomat Arthur Snell to discuss How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2021, his compelling and convincing account of the outsized role Britain has played in provoking or exacerbating many of the international crises of the past few decades.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*After graduating from Oxford with a first class degree in history, Arthur Snell joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A fluent Arabic speaker, he served in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Yemen, and Iraq. He headed the international strand of the UK Government’s Prevent counterterrorism programme. He is currently a geopolitical consultant and host of the hit podcast Doomsday Watch.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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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...*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A collection of seven extraordinary short stories, Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood resists interpretation and elides description, shifting between voices and styles with astonishing deftness and grace. Spaces and territories are important to the book, how we inhabit them and how they shape us, as are attempts to understand how not just our minds, but our entire beings are affected when we pass from darkness into light, and back again. Buy Dark Neighbourhood: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781913097707/dark-neighbourhood*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer and poet living in London. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prototype, frieze and Five Dials. Her story ‘At the Heart of Things’ won the White Review Short Story Prize 2019.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=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we’re joined by Olivia Laing, one of the finest non-fiction writers at work today, to discuss her latest book Everybody: A Book About Freedom.Buy Everybody here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781509857128/everybody*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, and Frieze, among many other publications. Her books include Crudo, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, and The Lonely City, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and translated into fifteen languages. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, she lives in London, England.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=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Meg Mason, author of the literary sensation Sorrow and Bliss.*'It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud... Extraordinary'GuardianEveryone 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?*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.”*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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 bookAdam 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=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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-memoirThe 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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Superstar Poets and (Step)Fatherhood in Chile, with Alejandro ZambraWhat 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*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf 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/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.*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-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Shak Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.