Shakespeare and Company: Writers, Books and Paris
By Shakespeare and Company
Conversations with internationally acclaimed authors, recorded live from our bookshop in the heart of Paris. Hosted by Adam Biles.
From January 2022, paid subscribers will get early access to author interviews, regular “classic” episodes featuring some of the most brilliant writers to visit us over the years, as well as bonus episodes recorded at the bookshop and around Paris.
Money raised through subscriptions goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit association.
From January 2022, paid subscribers will get early access to author interviews, regular “classic” episodes featuring some of the most brilliant writers to visit us over the years, as well as bonus episodes recorded at the bookshop and around Paris.
Money raised through subscriptions goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit association.
Shakespeare and Company: Writers, Books and ParisJun 10, 2021
00:00
01:04:16
** Valentine's Special ** Xiaolu Guo on A Lover's Discourse
For the Valentine’s week episode of our podcast, we were joined by Xiaolu Guo to discuss her intense, fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, A Lover’s Discourse.
Buy A Lover’s Discourse here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781529112481/a-lovers-discourse
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES
If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:
- An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
- The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
- Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
- And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.
Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco
Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.
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A Chinese woman comes to post-Brexit London to start over - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch.
Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build their future together.
Playing with language and the cultural differences that our narrator encounters as she settles into her new life, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.
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Xiaolu Guo was born in south China. She studied at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before moving to London in 2002. Her books include Village of Stone which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and I Am China which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the Jhalak Prize and the Rathbones Folio Award 2018, and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.
In 2013 Xiaolu was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She has directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese, and documentaries about China and Britain. She was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2019, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Feb 10, 202247:09
Andrew Hankinson on Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.)
This week’s guest is Andrew Hankinson, author of the brilliant Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.), a book about three things:
1. A room called the Comedy Cellar.
2. Who gets to speak in that room.
3. What they get to say.
Buy Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781911617686/dont-applaud-either-laugh-or-dont-at-the-comedy-cellar
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES
If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:
- An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
- The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
- Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
- And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.
Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco
Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.
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The Comedy Cellar is a tiny basement club in New York's Greenwich Village. Run according to the principles of its owners, the Dworman family, it became a safe place for stand-ups to take risks and experiment. Superstar comedians such as Amy Schumer, Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart, and Louis CK became regulars, celebrities started to hang out, the club hosted debates, and everyone was encouraged to argue at its back table. Then the Comedy Cellar ended up on the frontline of the global culture war.
Andrew Hankinson speaks to the Cellar's owner, comedians, and audience members, using interviews, emails, podcasts, letters, text messages, and previously private documents to create a conversation about who gets to speak and what they get to say, and why. Moving backwards in time from Louis CK's downfall to when Manny Dworman used to host folk singers including Bob Dylan, this is about a comedy club, but it's also about the widening cultural chasm.
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Andrew Hankinson is a journalist who was born, raised, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, northern England. He started his career at Arena magazine and is now a freelance feature writer who has contributed to publications including GQ, The Observer, The Guardian, and Wired. His first book, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], won the CWA Non-Fiction Prize in 2016.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Feb 03, 202201:04:29
Patrick Hastings, The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses
In anticipation of the first episode of Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses this Wednesday, we were delighted to talk to former S&Co tumbleweed Patrick Hastings, and the creator of UlyssesGuide.com, about The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, his essential companion to this modernist classic.
Buy The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781421443492/the-guide-to-james-joyces-ulysses
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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR EARLY EPISODES AND BONUS FEATURES
All episodes of Friends of Shakespeare Read Ulysses are free and available to everyone. However, if you want to be the first to hear the recordings, by subscribing, you can now get early access to recordings of complete sections.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco
Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
In addition, if you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, a subscription gets you access to regular bonus episodes of the bookshop's interview podcast. All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.
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Discover more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com
Buy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulysses
Find out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/home
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Hear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Follow him on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/
Hear more of Flora Hibberd here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5EFG7rqfVfdyaXiRZbRkpS
Hear more from Adrien Chicot here: https://bbact.lnk.to/utco90/
Follow him on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/adrienchicot/
Jan 29, 202201:02:45
Nadifa Mohamed on The Fortune Men
This week’s guest is Booker-shortlisted Nadifa Mohamed discussing The Fortune Men a gripping fictional portrayal of a real miscarriage of justice in 1950s Cardiff.
Buy The Fortune Men here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241466940/the-fortune-men-shortlisted-for-the-costa-novel-of-the-year-award
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES
If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:
An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.
Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco
Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.
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Mahmood Mattan is a fixture in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustles with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He is a father, chancer, some-time petty thief. He is many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn't too worried. It is true that he has been getting into trouble more often since his Welsh wife Laura left him. But Mahmood is secure in his innocence in a country where, he thinks, justice is served. It is only in the run-up to the trial, as the prospect of freedom dwindles, that it will dawn on Mahmood that he is in a terrifying fight for his life - against conspiracy, prejudice and the inhumanity of the state. And, under the shadow of the hangman's noose, he begins to realise that the truth may not be enough to save him.
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Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, in 1981 and moved to Britain at the age of four. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize; it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. Her second novel, Orchard of Lost Souls, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. Nadifa Mohamed was selected for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Nadifa Mohamed lives in London.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jan 27, 202252:42
Introducing Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
2nd February - 16th June 2022
933 Pages, 110 readers, (roughly) 70 characters, 18 Sections, 5 months, 1 book. 100 years.
Friends of Shakespeare and Company read ULYSSES by James Joyce
To listen, subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.
Friends of Shakespeare and Company read ULYSSES is conceived and produced at Shakespeare and Company in Paris by S&Co Literary Director Adam Biles in collaboration with Professor Lex Paulson, and in partnership with Penguin Classics and Hay Festival.
Find out more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com
Buy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulysses
Find out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/home
Jan 20, 202200:43
Rebecca Solnit on Orwell’s Roses
Our guest this week is the wonderful Rebecca Solnit discussing Orwell’s Roses, her fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.
Buy Orwell’s Roses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783788620/orwells-roses
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES
If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:
- An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
- The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
- Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
- And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.
Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco
Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.
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From 1936 to 1940, the newly-wed George Orwell lived in a small cottage inHertfordshire, writing, and tending his garden. When Rebecca Solnit visited the cottage, she discovered the descendants of the roses that he had planted many decades previously. These survivors, as well as the diaries he kept of his planting and growing, provide a springboard for a fresh look at Orwell's motivations and drives -and the optimism that countered his dystopian vision - and open up a profound mediation on our relationship to plants, trees and the natural world.
Tracking Orwell's impact on political thought over the last century, Solnit journeys toEngland and Russia, Mexico and Colombia, exploring the political and historical events that shaped Orwell's life and her own. From a history of roses to discussions of climate change and insights into structural inequalities in contemporary society, Orwell's Roses is a fresh reading of a towering figure of 20th century literary and political life, which finds optimism, solace and solutions to our 21st century world.
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Rebecca Solnit is author of, among other books, Call Them By Their True Names, The Mother of All Questions, Men Explain Things to Me, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC award-winning River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. A contributing editor to Harper’s, she writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jan 20, 202201:02:26
Lauren Elkin on No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute
For our first podcast of 2022 we leave the bookshop and take to the buses of Paris for a conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute.
Buy No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781838014186/no-9192-notes-on-a-parisian-commute
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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES
If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:
- An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
- The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
- Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
- And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.
Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco
Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.
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Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people.
Lauren Elkin is a Franco-American writer and translator. Her last book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her translation, with Charlotte Mandell, of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau, won the 2017 French-American Foundation's Translation Prize. Her next book, Art Monsters: on Beauty and Excess, is to be published by Chatto & Windus. She currently lives in London, with her partner and son.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jan 13, 202243:03
Claire Messud on A Dream Life
This week we’re joined by Claire Messud to discuss A Dream Life, her drily funny, deeply perceptive story about displacement, and class, and social climbing, and the effect that having domestic staff can have not only on one’s family, but on one’s sense of self.
Buy A Dream Life here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781649697295/a-dream-life
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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“A perfect frolic of a book, puffed on breezes of beauty and wit: it waltzes you through a little fear, a little darkness, and tips you out, refreshed and laughing, into the sun.” Helen Garner
When the Armstrong family moves from New York at the dawn of the 1970s, Australia feels, to Alice Armstrong, like the end of the earth. Residing in a grand manor on the glittering Sydney Harbour, her family finds their life has turned upside down. As she navigates this strange new world, Alice must find a way to weave an existence from its shimmering mirage.
Lies and self-deception are at the heart of this keenly observed story. This is a sharp, biting and playful tale with a cast of unscrupulous characters adrift in a dream life of their own making.
Written with the characteristic delicacy of touch, humour and emotional insight that makes Claire Messud one of our greatest writers.
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Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Dec 30, 202148:55
BONUS: Cerys Matthews reads A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas
As a little treat this Christmas, we’re delighted to bring you an extract of Cerys Matthews reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas. Cerys read the same extract when she last visited us at the bookshop in December 2015. It was such a magical moment that, when we learned that Cerys had recorded this story for posterity, we asked if we could share some of it with you.
The full version is available on CD here: https://cerysmatthews.co.uk/product/dylan-thomas-a-childs-christmas-poems-and-tiger-eggs/
Or to stream on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4r8YyMz1maFauVfo9RznXv?si=WSGzsLOJSUu5xzDjY-0Q1w
If you enjoy listening to our podcast and would like to spend even more of 2022 with us in Paris, you can now subscribe for exclusive regular bonus episodes.
On Spotify: https://anchor.fm/sandco/subscribe
On Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
Or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32H…kLNA&dl_branch=1
Dec 24, 202109:29
Sarah Hall on Burntcoat
This week Adam is joined by Sarah Hall, author of Burntcoat a novel of and for our times. Called “dark and brilliant” by Sarah Moss and “a masterpiece” by Daisy Johnson, much like the Japanese burnt timber technique evoked in the book, Burntcoat leaves readers scarred but fortified, more ready to face life’s elements.
Buy Burntcoat here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571329328/burntcoat
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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You were the last one here before I closed the door of Burntcoat, before we all shut our doors.
In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. Her life will draw to an end in the coming days.
Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.
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Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently the only author to be four times shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Dec 23, 202158:49
Welcome to Shakespeare and Company: Writers, Books and Paris
Welcome to the Shakespeare and Company podcast. Every week or so we release a new conversation with an internationally acclaimed author, recorded at our store in the heart of Paris. Recent guests have included Elif Shafak, Richard Powers, Leïla Slimani, Lauren Groff, Armando Iannucci and many more.
And for those of you who want to spend even more time here at Kilometre Zero, you can now subscribe for just three euros a month.
For that, you’ll get exclusive access to regular bonus episodes including…
- An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
- The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
- Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
- And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.
All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events. We’re very grateful for your support.
Dec 16, 202100:60
Aysegül Savas on White on White
This week Aysegül Savaş joined Adam live in our writer’s studio to discuss White on White, her book about art and artists, parents and their children, beauty and class, as well as the quest for perfection and the compromises we make in pursuit of it. White on White was called "marvelous" by Lauren Groff and "gentle, mysterious and profound” by Marina Abramović.
Buy White on White here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780593330517/white-on-white-a-novel
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.
In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.
What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.
White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.
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Ayşegül Savaş is the author of Walking on the Ceiling. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Dec 16, 202148:19
Lauren Groff on Matrix
This week Adam is joined by Lauren Groff, whose latest novel Matrix an extraordinary story of transformation, visions, leaps of faith, vicious battles, friendship, and creativity, as well as — to cite USA Today — “a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell”. Matrix is a true original, unlike any literary experience you will have this year, probably one of the many reasons for which it was selected as a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award.
Buy Matrix here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781785151910/matrix-the-new-york-times-bestseller
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Seventeen-year-old Marie, too wild for courtly life, is thrown to the dogs one winter morning, expelled from the royal court to become the prioress of an abbey. Marie is strange - tall, a giantess, her elbows and knees stick out, ungainly.
At first taken aback by life at the abbey, Marie finds purpose and passion among her mercurial sisters. Yet she deeply misses her secret lover Cecily and queen Eleanor.
Born last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, women who flew across the countryside with their sword fighting and dagger work, Marie decides to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. She will bring herself, and her sisters, out of the darkness, into riches and power.
MATRIX is a bold vision of female love, devotion and desire from one of the most adventurous writers at work today.
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Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Dec 02, 202154:12
Poets Richard Barnett and Luke Kennard in conversation
This week Adam is joined by poets Richard Barnett and Luke Kennard. Richard Barnet’s WHEREVER WE ARE WHEN WE COME TO THE END is an imagining of the experience of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein in the First World War, recounted in the same austere and succinct statements as the philosopher’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, the initial notes for which were taken during the conflict. The result is an affecting examination of love, duty and violence that had such a strong impact on me that it sent me back to investigate Wittgenstein’s writing with fresh eyes. Sarah Bakewell called WHEREVER WE ARE WHEN WE COME TO THE END “ingenious, devastating and filled with emotional riches.”
Luke Kennard’s NOTES ON THE SONNETS, revisits Shakespeare’s poetry in a chain of prose poems set in a British house party. The party is a contradictory beast—at once crushingly dull yet flecked with the absurd, at once sprawling yet intensely claustrophobic. Kennard’s poems embody these contradictions too, they somehow manage to be superficial yet profound, charmingly insolent yet glacially serious, knowingly pretentious yet deeply insecure and self-critical, and they take in almost every subject under the stars. NOTES ON THE SONNETS was a Poetry Book Society recommendation, and recently won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021.
Buy WHEREVER WE ARE WHEN WE COME TO THE END here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781912436583/wherever-we-are-when-we-come-to-the-end
Buy NOTES ON THE SONNETS here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781908058812/notes-on-the-sonnets
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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Richard Barnett is a poet and historian. He taught the history of science and medicine at Cambridge, UCL, and Oxford for more than a decade, and his history books include Medical London, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and The Sick Rose, an international bestseller.
His first poetry collection Seahouses was published by Valley Press in 2015, and was short-listed for the Poetry Business Prize. His next poetry publication was Wherever We Are When We Come to the End, a poetic experiment digging into the form and language of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, published in May 2021.
Luke Kennard has published five collections of poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. He lectures at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of the Next Generation Poets. His debut novel, The Transition, is published in 2017 by Fourth Estate.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Nov 25, 202156:08
Katharina Volckmer on The Appointment
Buckle up! This week we welcome Katharina Volckmer discussing her wild, taboo-busting debut novel The Appointment, a transgressive, spiky, astonishingly light-footed, and very, very funny monologue about sex, nationhood, shame . . . and often all three combined.
Buy The Appointment here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781913097325/the-appointment
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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In a well-appointed examination in London, a young woman unburdens herself to a certain Dr Seligman. Though she can barely see above his head, she holds forth about her life and desires, and her struggles with her sexuality and identity. Born and raised in Germany, she has been living in London for several years, determined to break free from her family origins and her haunted homeland. In a monologue that is both razor-sharp and subversively funny, she takes us on a wide-ranging journey from outre sexual fantasies and overbearing mothers to the medicinal properties of squirrel tails and the enduring legacy of shame. With The Appointment, her audacious debut novel, Katharina Volckmer challenges our notions of what is fluid and what is fixed and injects a dose of Bernhardian snark into contemporary British fiction.
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Katharina Volckmer was born in Germany in 1987. She lives in London, where she works for a literary agency. The Appointment is her first novel.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Nov 18, 202154:50
Armando Iannucci on Pandemonium
This week Adam Biles is joined by comedy-legend Armando Iannucci to discuss Pandemonium, his riotously funny, but also deeply affecting mock-epic about the mistakes made and palms-greased during the British government’s handling of the pandemic.
Buy Pandemonium here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781408715086/pandemonium-some-verses-on-the-current-predicament
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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Tell, Mighty Wit, how the highest in forethought and,
That tremendous plus, The Science,
Saw off our panic and Globed vexation
Until a drape of calmness furled around the earth
And beckoned a new and greater normal into each life
For which we give plenty gratitude and pay
Willingly for the vict'ry triumph
Merited by these wisest gods.
Pandemonium is an epic mock-heroic poem, written in response to the pandemic with all the anger and wit that Armando Iannucci brings to his vision of contemporary events. It tells the story of how Orbis Rex, Young Matt and his Circle of Friends, Queen Dido and the blind Dom'nic did battle with 'a wet and withered bat' from Wuhan.
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Armando Iannucci is a writer and broadcaster who has written, directed and produced numerous critically acclaimed films, television and radio comedy shows.
His screenplay for the film 'In The Loop' was nominated for an Oscar at the Academy Awards. His iconic series for the BBC – 'The Thick of It' – was nominated for 13 BAFTA Awards, winning 5 during its four series run. Among his own award-winning shows, he is also the co-creator and writer of the popular Steve Coogan character Alan Partridge.
Armando's HBO comedy 'Veep' has picked up numerous awards, including four Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series over the last four years. His film adaptation of Charles Dickens' 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' was released in January 2020, which that year won Best Screenplay at BIFA, was also nominated for a Golden Globe and won a 'Seal of Distinction' from the US Critics' Choice Association.
In 2017 he published 'Hear Me Out', a new book on classical music, and released the feature film 'The Death of Stalin', which was nominated for 2 BAFTAs and won Best Comedy at the European Film Awards.
His latest HBO series, 'Avenue 5', which stars Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad, aired on SKY in January 2020, and is currently in production for the second series.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Nov 10, 202136:57
Eimear McBride on Something Out of Place: Women and Disgust
This week our guest is the brilliant Eimear McBride, discussing her first book of non-fiction Something Out of Place. Beginning with the sentiment of disgust with which, McBride argues, society regards and treats women, it develops into a blistering and astute polemic against the patriarchal framework that oppresses, coerces, sculpts controls and all too often ends the lives of half the world’s population.
Buy Something Out of Place here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781788162869/something-out-of-place-women-disgust
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing received a number of awards including the Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and Irish Novel of the Year. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She occasionally writes and reviews for Guardian, TLS and New Statesman.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Nov 04, 202158:00
Richard Powers on Bewilderment
Our guest this week is Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, discussing Bewilderment, his moving and visionary, Booker-shortlisted novel about a bereaved father and his neurodiverse son, their hunt for life on planets—both real and imaginary—and their attempts to convince others that life on our own planet is worth saving.
Buy Bewilderment here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781785152634/bewilderment-shortlisted-for-the-booker-prize-2021
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Theo Byrne is a promising young scientist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son Robin is funny, loving and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from school for smashing his friend's face with a thermos.
What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, all while fostering his son's desperate attempt to save this one.
At the heart of Bewilderment lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?
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Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Oct 27, 202101:01:56
BONUS PODCAST* Poetry from Archipelago Books
This special podcast is a collaboration with our friends at Archipelago books, showcasing three of their wonderful poetry titles: Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated by Nandana Dev Sen; Allegri by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Geoffrey Brock; And Until the Lions by Karthika Naïr.
Buy Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated by Nandana Dev Sen here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781939810809/acrobat
Buy Allegri by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Geoffrey Brock here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781939810649/allegria
Buy Until the Lions by Karthika Naïr here: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/until-the-lions-echoes-from-the-mahabharata/
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Famed for his brevity, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction. These are the kinds of poems that, through their numinous clarity and shifting intimations, can make a poetry-lover of the most stone-faced non-believer. Ungaretti won multiple prizes for his poetry, including the 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He was a major proponent of the Hermetic style, which proposed a poetry in which the sounds of words were of equal import to their meanings. This auditory awareness echoes through Brock’s hair-raising translations, where a man holding vigil with his dead, open-mouthed comrade, says, “I have never felt / so fastened / to life.”
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A radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic that together evokes the arc of an ordinary life. Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s rhythmic lines explore the joys and agonies of first love, childbirth, and decay with a restless, tactile imagination, both picking apart and celebrating the rituals that make us human. When she warns, “know that blood can be easily drawn by lips,” her words tune to the fierce and biting depths of language, to the “treachery that lingers on tongue tips.” At once compassionate and unsparing, conversational and symphonic, these poems tell of a rope shivering beneath an acrobat’s nimble feet or of a twisted, blood-soaked umbilical cord – they pluck the invisible threads that bind us together.
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A dazzling and eloquent reworking of the Mahabharata, the ancient Asian epic, through nineteen voices on the periphery. With daring poetic forms, Karthika Naïr breathes life into this ancient epic.
In Until the Lions, Karthika Naïr retells the Mahabharata through the embodied voices of women and marginal characters, so often conquered and destroyed throughout history. She captures the richness and complexity of the Mahabharata, while illuminating lives buried beneath the edifices of one of the world’s most venerated books. Through shifting poetic forms, ranging from pantoums to Petrarchan sonnets, Naïr choreographs the cadences of stray voices. And with a passionate empathy, she tells of nameless soldiers, their despairing spouses and lovers, a canny empress, an all-powerful god, and a gender-shifting outcast warrior. Until the Lions is a kaleidoscopic, poetic tour de force. It reveals the most intimate threads of desire, greed, and sacrifice in this foundational epic.
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Oct 23, 202138:15
David Runciman on Confronting Leviathan
This week Adam Biles is joined by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and the presenter of the hugely popular Talking Politics podcast. David's new book Confronting Leviathan is a compelling and accessible introduction to some of the most important and radical thinkers (Wolstonecraft, Constant, De Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Hayek, MacKinnon, Fukuyama and more…) whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the modern state.
Buy Confronting Leviathan here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781788167826/confronting-leviathan-a-history-of-ideas
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Based on the History Of Ideas podcast series by Talking Politics host David Runciman, A History of Ideas explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics - from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, and from revolution to lock down.
While explaining the most important and often-cited ideas of thinkers such as Constant, De Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Hayek, MacKinnon and Fukuyama, David Runciman shows how crises - revolutions, wars, depressions, pandemics - generated these new ways of political thinking. This is a history of ideas to help make sense of what's happening today.
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David Runciman is Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and the presenter of the popular Talking Politics podcast. He is the author of many books about politics, including The Politics of Good Intentions (2006), Political Hypocrisy (2008) and The Confidence Trap (2013). He writes regularly about politics and current affairs for a wide range of publications including the London Review of Books.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Oct 20, 202101:08:20
Anuk Arudpragasam on A Passage North
This week we’re joined Anuk Arudpragasm to discuss A Passage North, his Booker-shortlisted story of age and youth, loss and survival in Sri Lanka.
Buy A Passage North here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783786947/a-passage-north
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother”s former care-giver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires.
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the soul of an island devastated by violence. Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the dead, and a luminous meditation on time, consciousness, and the lasting imprint of the connections we make with others.
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Anuk Arudpragasam was born in Colombo and currently lives between Sri Lanka and India. His debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize as well as the Internationaler Literaturpreis. He received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 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-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Oct 13, 202154:14
Ian Dunt on How to Be a Liberal
This week Ian Dunt joined Adam Biles to discuss How to Be a Liberal, his immensely readable history of, and rallying cry for, “the single most radical political programme in the history of humankind.”
Buy How to Be a Liberal here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781912454457/how-to-be-a-liberal-the-story-of-freedom-and-the-fight-for-its-survival
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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The authoritarian right is taking control. From Viktor Orban in Hungary, to Brexit in Britain, to Donald Trump in America, nationalists have launched an all-out assault on liberal values. In this groundbreaking new book, political journalist Ian Dunt tells the story of liberalism, from its birth in the fight against absolute monarchy to the modern-day resistance against the new populism. In a soaring narrative that stretches from the battlefields of the English Civil War to the 2008 financial crash and beyond, this vivid, page-turning book explains the political ideas which underpin the modern world. But it is also something much more than that - it is a rallying cry for those who still believe in freedom and reason.
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Ian Dunt is a columnist at the i newspaper, a regular host on the Oh God What Now podcast, a columnist for the New European and the i newspaper, and the author of two books: Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now and How To Be A Liberal. Follow Ian on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/IanDunt
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Oct 06, 202101:01:47
Leïla Slimani on The Country of Others
This week we’re joined by the brilliant Leïla Slimani to discuss The Country of Others, her immensely readable, deeply moving, Steinbeckian family drama set against the grand sweep of Moroccan and French history.
Buy The Country of Others here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571361625/the-country-of-others
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Alsace, 1944. Mathilde finds herself falling deeply in love with Amine Belhaj, a Moroccan soldier, billeted in her town, fighting for the French.
After the Liberation, Mathilde leaves France, following Amine to Morocco. But life here is unrecognizable to this brave and passionate young woman. Where she she once danced, bickered with her sister, her life is now that of a farmer's wife - with all the sacrifices and vexations that brings.
Suffocated by the heat, by her loneliness on the farm, by the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner and by the lack of money Mathilde grows restless. As Morocco's own struggle for independence grows daily, Mathilde and Amine find themselves caught in the crossfire . . .
This story of two nations at war, two cultures at loggerheads, and one family torn apart is as tenderly observed as it is devastatingly true
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Leïla Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, which she won for Lullaby. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Sep 29, 202157:56
Tom McCarthy on The Making of Incarnation
This week, we welcome the twice Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy here to discuss The Making of Incarnation, a novel that asks some of the most pressing but also most confounding questions of our age. How much will we ever be able to understand the forces that drive the universe, and how much meaning should we ascribe to them? Will the drive for efficiency inevitably strip away our humanity? What are we left with that is particular, peculiar and that belongs to us once our lives are fed into the churning data maelstrom? And if everything can be planned and plotted down to the minutest detail, what happens when, inevitably, there’s a glitch?
Buy The Making of Incarnation here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781787333307/the-making-of-incarnation-from-the-twice-booker-shorlisted-author-of-c-and-satin-island
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com *
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Tom McCarthy's work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His third novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the European Literature Prize and his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Sep 22, 202101:00:26
Claire-Louise Bennett on Checkout 19
This week, we welcome one of the most innovative and fearless writers at work today, Claire-Louise Bennett, here to discuss CHECKOUT 19 a novel that explores class, freedom, adolescence, transcendence, sexual politics and artistic synthesis.
Buy Checkout 19 here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781787333550/checkout-19
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com *
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Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper's Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, and New York Times Magazine.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Sep 15, 202101:14:09
David Keenan on Monument Maker
Join us as we take a plunge into the wild mind of David Keenan and his latest novel, the hallucinatory masterpiece Monument Maker.
“In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination” LENNY KAYE
Buy Monument Maker here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474617093/monument-maker
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author two novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device (Faber & Faber), which won the Collyer Bristow/London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, and For The Good Times (Faber & Faber). He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse (Strange Attractor Press), a history of the UK's post-punk/Industrial underground, as well as To Run Wild In It (Rough Trade Books), an experimental novella, and the co-designer, alongside Sophy Hollington, of his own tarot pack, the Autonomic Tarot (Rough Trade Books).
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Sep 08, 202153:58
Elif Shafak on The Island of Missing Trees
For our first podcast of la rentrée we were delighted to be joined by Elif Shafak, with us to discuss her mesmerising new novel The Island of Missing Trees, a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, memory and amnesia, human-induced destruction of nature, and, finally, renewal.
Buy The Island of Missing Trees. here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241434994/the-island-of-missing-trees-the-top-10-sunday-times-bestseller
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com *
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Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist. She has published 19 books, 12 of which are novels. She is a bestselling author in many countries around the world and her work has been translated into 55 languages. Her latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize; and was Blackwell’s Book of the Year. The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by BBC among the 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. The Architect’s Apprentice was chosen for the Duchess of Cornwall’s inaugural book club, The Reading Room. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including St Anne's College, Oxford where she is an honorary fellow.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Sep 01, 202152:40
Pola Oloixarac and John Freeman, in conversation
As the S&Co podcast takes its summer break for a few weeks, we leave you with this fascinating and funny conversation between Pola Oloixarac and John Freeman, recorded on the bookshop terrace on 19th July. Many thanks to John, Pola and the NYU Creative Writing Program for making this very special evening possible.
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Buy Pola Oloixarac’s books here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/search?q=Pola+Oloixarac&type=books
Buy John Freeman’s There's a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780593314692/theres-a-revolution-outside-my-love-letters-from-a-crisis
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Pola Oloixarac was born in Buenos Aires, where she studied Philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She's the author of the novels Savage Theories, Dark Constellations and Mona. She's the recipient of the 2020 Eccles Centre Prize, and was named one of Granta Best of Young Spanish Novelists in 2010. Her pieces about culture and politics have appeared in The New York Times, BBC and La Nación, where she writes a political column. She lives in Barcelona.
John Freeman is the founder of Freeman's and an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. The author and editor of ten books, his work includes the anthologies Tales of Two Planets and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story; a book-length essay, Dictionary of the Undoing, and two collections of poems; Maps and The Park. His most recent book, co-edited with Tracy K. Smith, is There's a Revolution Outside My Love. He is Artist in Residence at NYU.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Aug 12, 202158:02
Katie Kitamura on Intimacies
In the second episode from our first in-store event in 18 months, Katie Kitamura discusses her deeply affecting, Barack Obama-approved, fourth novel Intimacies with S&Co Literary Director, Adam Biles.
Buy Intimacies here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781787332003/intimacies-a-barack-obama-summer-2021-reading-pick
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Katie Kitamura's most recent novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications, translated into 16 languages, and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot were both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena, Kitamura has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, Guardian, BOMB, and Triple Canopy. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Aug 05, 202136:45
Jakuta Alikavazovic on Night As It Falls
For our first in-store event for more than eighteen months we were joined by two of our favourite novelists, Jakuta Alikavazovic and Katie Kitamura.
In this first episode from that evening Jakuta Alikavazovic discusses her extraordinary, crepuscular novel Night As It Falls with S&Co Literary Director, Adam Biles.
Buy Night As It Falls here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571342266/night-as-it-falls
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her debut novel, Corps Volatils, won the Prix Goncourt in 2008 for Best First Novel. She has translated works by Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace and Anna Burns into French. She lives in Paris and writes a regular column for the daily newspaper Libération.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jul 28, 202138:22
Laurent Binet on Civilisations
This week we were joined by Laurent Binet, discussing Civilisations, his hugely entertaining counterfactual novel in which Atahualpa leads an army of two hundred Incas to Europe . . .
Buy Civilisations here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781787302297/civilisations
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Laurent Binet lives and works in France. His first novel, HHhH, was an international bestseller which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, among other prizes. The 7th Function of Language won the Prix de la FNAC and Prix Interallié. Civilisations is a bestseller that has won the Grand Prix de l'Académie française.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jul 21, 202156:08
Eliot Higgins on We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People
Today, Adam was joined by Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, a collective of self-taught internet sleuths who have solved some of the biggest crimes of our time, from the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over the Ukraine to the sourcing of weapons in the Syrian Civil War and the identification of the Salisbury poisoners.
Buy We Are Bellingcat here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781526615732/we-are-bellingcat-an-intelligence-agency-for-the-people
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat and pioneer of online open source investigation, a new investigative methodology that has significantly impacted a range of fields and specialisations, from journalism to justice and accountability. Starting as a blogger and entirely self-taught, Higgins' work has now opened up new ways to investigate a wide range of topics, with Higgins' own investigative work covering topics such at the downing of Malaysian Airlines 17 over Ukraine in July 17, chemical weapon use in Syria and the application of these new investigation techniques to the work of organisations like the International Criminal Court, where Higgins' is part of the Technology Advisory Board.
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jul 14, 202101:00:13
Pragya Agarwal on (M)otherhood
Joining Adam Biles this week is behavioural and data scientist Dr Pragya Agarwal discussing (M)otherhood her meticulously researched, searingly honest investigation into motherhood and fertility.
Buy (M)otherhood here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781838853167/motherhood
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Dr Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist. After gaining her PhD from the University of Nottingham, she was a senior academic in US and UK universities for over twelve years. As well as numerous research papers, she is the author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias and Wish We Knew What to Say: Talking with Children about Race. Sway was picked as a ‘best science book of 2020’, Guardian Book of the Week and was shortlisted for the Transmission Prize. A passionate campaigner for racial and gender equality, Pragya is a two-time TEDx speaker, a TEDx Women organiser and the founder of a research think-tank ‘The 50 Percent Project’. As a freelance journalist, she writes regularly for the Guardian, Prospect, Forbes, Huffington Post, BBC Science Focus and New Scientist among others. She has also written for AEON, Scientific American and the Wellcome Trust.
@DrPragyaAgarwal | drpragyaagarwal.com
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jul 07, 202157:46
Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan on Francis Bacon: Revelations
This week we’re joined by Pulitzer-prizewinners Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan to discuss Francis Bacon: Revelations, their biography of one of the most radical, shocking and slippery artists of the 20th century.
Buy Francis Bacon Revelations here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780007298419/francis-bacon-revelations
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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The biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have spent decades in the art and publishing worlds of New York, Mark as a veteran art critic and Annalyn as the former arts editor of Newsweek and a former music critic.
Their first book, de Kooning: An American Master, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2005, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book award for biography. The New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of 2005.
The authors live in New York City. They have two daughters, two cats, and one grandson.
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
Jun 30, 202101:09:55
Jennifer Lucy Allan on The Foghorn's Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast
This week we were joined by Jennifer Lucy Allan, author of one of the most peculiar and moving non-fiction books of the year. The Foghorn’s Lament is one woman’s quest to uncover and understand the booming, lonely machine that soundtracks the oceans.
Buy The Foghorn’s Lament here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781474615037/the-foghorns-lament
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer, journalist and broadcaster with a PhD in foghorns. She has been a journalist for over a decade, writing on underground and experimental music for publications including The Guardian, The Quietus, and The Wire, and was previously The Wire’s Online Editor. She is a presenter on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, and wrote and presented Life, Death and the Foghorn for BBC Radio 4. She also runs the archival record label Arc Light Editions. THE FOGHORN’S LAMENT is her first book.
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Jun 23, 202157:40
Hari Kunzru on Red Pill
We were delighted to welcome back Hari Kunzru to discuss his recent novel Red Pill, a journey into the moral darkness of our times, and one of the most exciting and provocative books of the past year.
Buy Red Pill here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781471194474/red-pill
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, and White Tears, as well as a short story collection, Noise and a novella, Memory Palace. His new novel Red Pill will be published in September 2020. He is an honorary fellow of Wadham College Oxford, and has received fellowships from the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Berlin. He is the host of the podcast Into The Zone, coming in September from Pushkin Industries. He lives in New York City.
Follow Hari on Twitter: @harikunzru
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman's Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=1jyKZFg2QS6RpVIfoCLLPQ&dl_branch=1
Jun 16, 202101:00:06
Rob Doyle and Rachel Kushner in conversation
We were joined by two of the most radical and exciting voices in anglophone literature, Rob Doyle and Rachel Kushner, for a discussion of art, class, truth and how much of a ‘sick puppy’ Georges Bataille really was.
Buy Rob Doyle’s Threshold here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781526607089/threshold
Buy Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781787333109/the-hard-crowd
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award. She grew up in San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles.
Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle has adapted it for a film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle's collection of short stories, This is the Ritual, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Doyle is the editor of the The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. He teaches on the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Limerick, and lives the rest of the year in Berlin.
Follow Rob on Twitter here: @RobDoyle1
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Jun 10, 202101:04:16
Niven Govinden & Musa Okwonga in conversation
This week we are joined by Niven Govinden and Musa Okwonga. On the face of it, their new novels—"Diary of a Film" and "In the End it was All About Love"—couldn’t seem more different, and yet they dialogue in many interesting ways. In conversation with Adam Biles, they talk art, love, cities, sexuality, belonging and food.
Buy Diary of a Film here: shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780349700717/diary-of-a-film
Buy In the End it Was All About Love here: roughtradebooks.com/books/in-the-end-it-was-all-about-love-2/
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In addition to Diary of a Film, Niven Govinden is the author of five previous novels, most recently This Brutal House, which was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and shortlisted for the Polari and Gordon Burn Prizes.
Follow Niven on Instagram: @niven_govinden
Musa Okwonga is a writer, broadcaster and musician. The co-host of the Stadio football podcast, he has published one collection of poetry and three books about football, the first of which, A Cultured Left Foot, was nominated for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. He has three books forthcoming in 2021: In The End, It Was All About Love (Rough Trade), a memoir set in Berlin; One of Them (Unbound), a memoir about his five years at Eton College; and Striking Out (Scholastic), a children’s novel written in collaboration with and based on the life of Ian Wright. Musa’s work has appeared in various outlets, including Africa Is A Country, The Byline Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and The Ringer. He lives in Berlin.
Follow Musa on Twitter: @Okwonga
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Buy Diary of a Film here: shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780349700717/diary-of-a-film
Buy In the End it Was All About Love here: roughtradebooks.com/books/in-the-end-it-was-all-about-love-2/
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In addition to Diary of a Film, Niven Govinden is the author of five previous novels, most recently This Brutal House, which was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and shortlisted for the Polari and Gordon Burn Prizes.
Follow Niven on Instagram: @niven_govinden
Musa Okwonga is a writer, broadcaster and musician. The co-host of the Stadio football podcast, he has published one collection of poetry and three books about football, the first of which, A Cultured Left Foot, was nominated for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. He has three books forthcoming in 2021: In The End, It Was All About Love (Rough Trade), a memoir set in Berlin; One of Them (Unbound), a memoir about his five years at Eton College; and Striking Out (Scholastic), a children’s novel written in collaboration with and based on the life of Ian Wright. Musa’s work has appeared in various outlets, including Africa Is A Country, The Byline Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and The Ringer. He lives in Berlin.
Follow Musa on Twitter: @Okwonga
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
May 27, 202101:03:28
Ece Temelkuran on Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now
This week Adam Biles was joined by Ece Temelkuran to discuss her thrilling new book “Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now” a unique and bold manifesto for how all of us can rise to the political and social challenges the world faces.
Buy TOGETHER here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780008393816/together
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known novelists and political commentators, and her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman and Der Spiegel. She has been twice recognized as Turkey’s most read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media (with 3 million twitter followers). Her recent novel Women Who Blow on Knots won the 2017 Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award.
Follow Ece Temelkuran on Twitter: @ETemelkuran
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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
May 13, 202152:34
Rosa Rankin-Gee on Dreamland
We were thrilled to be joined by Rosa Rankin-Gee to discuss her striking second novel Dreamland, a postcard from a near-future (don’t say post-apocalyptic!) Britain that’s may be closer than we think. Hosted by Adam Biles
Buy DREAMLAND here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781471193811/dreamland
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Rosa Rankin-Gee lives between Ramsgate and South London. Her first novel The Last Kings of Sark won Shakespeare & Company’s Paris Literary Prize. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Vogue, the Paris Review, and Esquire, among others.
Follow Rosa on Twitter: @rosarankingee
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
May 06, 202148:51
Jenni Fagan and Salena Godden in conversation with Adam Biles
We’re back! Welcome to the relaunched S&Co podcast. For the first episode after a long hiatus, we were thrilled to be joined (remotely!) by Jenni Fagan and Salena Godden to discuss their formally inventive and thematically bold new novels LUCKENBOOTH and MRS DEATH MISSES DEATH. Hosted by Adam Biles.
Buy LUCKENBOOTH here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780434023318/luckenbooth
Buy MRS DEATH MISSES DEATH here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781838851194/mrs-death-misses-death
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
Become a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com
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Jenni Fagan was born in Scotland. She graduated from Greenwich University and won a scholarship to the Royal Holloway MFA programme. She has just completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. A published poet and novelist, she has won awards from Creative Scotland, Dewar Arts, Scottish Screen and Scottish Book Trust among others, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jenni was selected as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists after the publication of her debut novel, The Panopticon, which was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. Her adaptation of The Panopticon was staged by the National Theatre of Scotland to great acclaim. The Sunlight Pilgrims, her second novel, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award and the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award, and saw her win Scottish Author of the Year at the Herald Culture Awards. She lives in Edinburgh with her son.
Follow Jenni on Twitter: @Jenni_Fagan
Salena Godden is one of Britain’s best loved poets and performers. She is also an activist, broadcaster, memoirist and essayist and is widely anthologised. She has published several volumes of poetry, the latest of which was Pessimism is for Lightweights, and a literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road.
Mrs Death Misses Death is her debut novel. A BBC Radio 4 documentary following Godden’s progress on the novel over twelve months was broadcast in 2018. In November 2020 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Follow Salena on Twitter: @salenagodden
Visit Salena’s website: www.salenagodden.co.uk
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Apr 29, 202158:20
An extract from Pond, read by Claire-Louise Bennett
For this episode, we’re thrilled to be collaborating with the brilliant Fitzcarraldo Editions to bring you an exclusive extract from the audiobook of their modern classic Pond, performed by its author Claire-Louise Bennett.
You can buy the audiobook from the publisher’s website www.fitzcarraldoeditions.com, and of course you can buy a physical copy of Pond from our online store, www.shakespeareandcompany.com where you can also find all manner of new and rare books, gifts, and tote bags, which we ship from Paris to wherever you are in the world.
About Claire-Louise Bennett
Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Penny Dreadful, The Moth, Colony, The Irish Times, The White Review and gorse. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013 and has received bursaries from the Arts Council Ireland and Galway City Council. Pond is her first collection of stories.
Music, as always, by Alex Freiman from his album, Play it Gentle, available on our online store: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/search?q=Alex+freiman&type=books
Sep 17, 202036:02
Renga through a Lockdown with Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr
We were delighted to welcome Karthika Naïr and Marilyn Hacker back to the bookshop. During lockdown, Marilyn and Karthika began writing Renga — a collaborative form of Japanese poetry — to each other, building up a beautiful and compelling body of work that engages with both the micro and the macro of this unprecedented moment. This meeting was the first time that these close friends had been in the same room as each other for several months, and their readings ring with the sorrow of separation but also the joy of rediscovery.
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Renga through a Lockdown: Shortly after France declared a full lockdown in March 2020, Marilyn Hacker invited Karthika Naïr to join her in creating a renga. Renga, literally “linked poem”, is the ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, which has evolved a little through the ages. Poets take turns to compose alternating tanka (5-7-5 and 7-7 syllabled-lines in the stanza) and each poet begins their opening line with word/s or idea/s from the preceding poem. Marilyn and Karthika’s renga are chronicles of their daily lives through the months of lockdown, triggered as much by immediate experiences in Paris as by echoes and concerns from friends and family in the US, Lebanon, India and elsewhere. And while both live in Paris, the distance between their homes (one in the 3rd arrondissement, the other in the 10th) - usually one of a few miles - seemed to multiply in this new world, with neighbourhoods transforming into distinct, new, terrain.
If you’d like to see a video of some of these readings, keep an eye on the social media of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival.
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Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Blazons ( 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror(2015) , a book of essays, Unauthorized Voices (2010), a collaborative book, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (2014) and seventeen books of translations of French and Francophone poets, most recently Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (2020). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.
Find more of Marilyn’s work here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marilyn-hacker
Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. She has helmed the scripts of several dance productions, such as the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), Akram Khan’s dance solo. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining in verse of the Mahabharata, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals across the world, including Granta, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Magazine, Indian Literature, The Wolf, and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. She is a 2012 Sangam House Fellow, a 2013 Toji Foundation Fellow and was awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015. Her latest book is the collaborative Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (2018), a travelogue in verse, written with Sampurna Chattarji, and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet and Roshni Vyam.
Find more of Karthika’s work here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150393/remaindering-habits
And here:
https://www.danceumbrella.co.uk/2017/08/29/six-degrees-otherness-part-2/
Aug 04, 202022:16
Lindsey Tramuta on The New Parisienne
We were delighted to be joined by Lindsey Tramuta to discuss her second book The New Parisienne—her fascinating follow-up to The New Paris—in which she explores the women and ideas shaping the French capital. We have a limited number of signed copies of The New Parisienne available in our online store: shakespeareandcompany.com/s/9781419742811/the-new-parisienne-the-women-ideas-shaping-paris
Jul 17, 202001:07:52
John Freeman reads from The Park
Welcome back to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast. We’re thrilled to return with a reading from a dear friend of the bookshop, John Freeman, reading from his new book of poetry The Park, a collection inspired by the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.
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Thanks for listening! We're now able to ship orders again. If you want to support Shakespeare and Company through this tough period, and bring a little taste of the bookshop to wherever you are in the world, please consider placing an order for a book or a gift, subscribing to a Year of Reading, or purchasing a gift voucher for future use. Visit our website www.shakespeareandcompany.com
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Thanks for listening! We're now able to ship orders again. If you want to support Shakespeare and Company through this tough period, and bring a little taste of the bookshop to wherever you are in the world, please consider placing an order for a book or a gift, subscribing to a Year of Reading, or purchasing a gift voucher for future use. Visit our website www.shakespeareandcompany.com
Jun 01, 202023:10