Denis Hirson’s My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah can be read as many different books. It can be read as a new, deeply personal, take on a pivotal episode in the history of South Africa. It can be read as a tender reflection on the mind of the author as he teetered on the cusp of adulthood. It can be read as a portrait of one particular wing of the Jewish diaspora, at one very particular moment in time. And it can be read as an account of how trauma is passed from one generation to the next, but also how with every new generation we are offered the opportunity of recovery…if only we will grasp it.My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah focuses primarily on the life of the author in the early 1960s, when he was between the age of nine and thirteen, and when the politics of his homeland was in turmoil after the brutal Sharpeville Massacre, carried out by the apartheid regime. Indeed, it’s these very politics that are going to impose themselves in a real and immediate fashion on the author’s world, not only shattering his idea of family, of community, of home, but also setting his life on a course that will ultimately see him pitch up in Paris.Buy My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/my-thirty-minute-bar-mitzvah*Denis Hirson has lived in France since 1975, yet has remained true to the title of one of his prose poems, ‘The long-distance South African’. Most of his nine books, both poetry and prose, are concerned with the memory of the apartheid years in South Africa. Two of his previous titles, The House Next Door to Africa and I Remember King Kong (the Boxer) were South African bestsellers. His most recent books are Ma langue au chat, sub-titled ‘tortures and delights of an English-speaker in Paris’, and a book of conversations with William Kentridge, Footnotes for the Panther.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood… Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space.A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.*Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.Born in Philadelphia, Amanda Dennis studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett. Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Colombe Schneck’s THE PARIS TRILOGY is a book—or rather three books, first published separately in French—about growing up, about friendship, about love, about family, about class, about womanhood and the patriarchy…and about swimming. In short, about every side of a life, as it just happens to take place in Paris. Rendered in crisp, fluid English by translators Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer—who joins the conversation— THE PARIS TRILOGY begins with SEVENTEEN, a searingly frank account of the abortion the writer had as a teenager, passes through FRIENDSHIP, the devastating record of a childhood bond cut brutally short, and concludes with SWIMMING: A LOVE STORY, the chronicle of how this particular sport helped her build, and then grieve, a relationship.Buy The Paris Trilogy: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-paris-trilogy*Colombe Schneck is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, she has received prizes from the Académie Française, Madame Figaro and the Society of French Writers. The recipient of scholarships from the Villa Medicis in Rome and the Institut Français, as well as a Stendhal grant which allows French writers to do research and write abroad, she also spent fifteen years as a broadcaster for Canal Plus, France TV and Radio France. She was born in Paris in 1966 where she still lives, is a graduate of Sciences Po and Université de Paris II with a degree in Public Law.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A woman speaks to us from her room in a residential home, of some description. She reflects on her life, her family, her pets, on time—the past, present and the future—on Manson Family Alumnus Leslie Van Houyten, on History, on Death, on the Occult, on what it means to be “sensitive”…and so much more besides. All the while she is distracted, bothered, grounded, and charmed by her fellow residents, a rag-tag slice of American life if ever a novel saw oner. As you can imagine from a Lynne Tillman book—indeed, as you would hope—things get discursive, things get disrupted, things get WEIRD, very quickly. First published in 2006, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY achieves the eerie feat of growing more pertinent as time goes on. Deeply aware of the tradition of the novel—perhaps the American novel in particular—Tillman is also confident enough in the newness of her project, and mischievous enough in her approach, to subvert that tradition almost to breaking point. To echo the words of George Saunders, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY is “beautiful, sacred, insane.”Buy American Genius, A Comedy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/american-genius*Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy; and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame Realism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Aysegul Savas, whose mesmerising third novel, The Anthropologists is about a great many things. It’s about what it means to leave one’s home. It’s about attempting to lay down roots elsewhere. It’s about the mystery, banality, and all-consuming nature of love. It’s about the dynamics of friendship, and how those are stress-tested by life. It’s about growing up and growing old. It’s about how our lives are shaped by rituals…and by the lack of them. And it’s about how anxiety-inducing it can be trying to buy a flat. More concretely, The Anthropologists is about Asya and Manu, young expats in an unnamed foreign city. Asya is a documentary maker, Manu works for an NGO. They lead a care-free, meticulously tended-to life of nights out, mornings in, coffees and pints with friends, and evenings of poetry with their eccentric upstairs neighbour. But all of this—its sustainability, its “realness”— is called into question by their decision to begin flat-hunting, as well as by other life changes—changes that are in their lives, but out of their control.Buy The Anthropologists here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-anthropologists*Aysegül Savas is the author of the acclaimed novels Walking on the Ceiling and White on White. Her work has been translated into six languages and 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. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For this special episode, recorded live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Adam Biles was joined by novelists Lauren Groff and Neel Mukherjee for a wide-ranging discussion that takes the temperature (and the pulse!) of the book industry, from bookshops, to publishers, to prizes, to festivals... Enjoy!Buy The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-shakespeare-and-company-book-of-interviewsBuy The Vaster Wilds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-vaster-wilds-3Buy Choice: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/choice-2*Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates andFuries, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.Neel Mukherjee won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010 for his debut novel A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. His novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and heralded as 'Stunning ... a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today' (NPR). Choice, a novel as triptych, is his latest book.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake is a spy novel stacked with ideas. As our fast-thinking, gun-packing protagonist wends her way down to the south of France, charged—by forces unknown—with infiltrating and sowing chaos at a commune of eco-warriors, her mission leads her into exhilarating reflections on activism, on charisma, on neanderthals and other lost races of archaic humans, on the remodelling—some might say devastation—of rural France in the name of progress, on loss in its myriad forms, on the shadows loss leaves behind, on Guy Debord, on the apparently charmed life of Louis Ferdinand Céline, on Daft Punk’s ubiquitous Get Lucky, on space, on time, on spacetime, and on the many paths she has and hasn’t taken in her life… As that list hopefully demonstrates, the scope of Creation Lake is vast, stretching from the micro of the personal to the macro of the cosmos—and touching on everything in between. And yet incredibly, Creation Lake never feels weighed down by all this. Quite the opposite. It hurls forward at exactly the dizzying speed you’d expect from the wise-cracking secret agent at its heart. All in all, Creation Lake is quite the ride. Recorded in Paris in March 2024.Buy Creation Lake: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/creation-lake-3*Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, as well as a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K. Her new book, THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020 will be published in April 2021. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our guest in the writer’s studio this week is Ferdia Lennon, whose debut novel Glorious Exploits depicts the ancient world in a way readers will never have experienced it before. Set in Syracuse in 412 BC, after the catastrophic attempt by Athens to invade the city, Lampo and Gelon, two out-of-work potters, have the harebrained idea of staging a production of Medea—perhaps the greatest play, by unquestionably the greatest playwright of their time—using, as actors, the Athenian soldiers held as prisoners in the quarry. And if that premise weren’t intriguing enough on it’s own, it’s the writer’s execution that really sets Glorious Exploits apart, as Lennon eschews the stilted formality that tales of Antiquity often lapse into, in favour of an always lively, frequently fruity, distinctly Irish vernacular. Glorious Exploits is a story about friendship, about art, about love, and about violence. It’s also a story about stories—those we tell each other, those we tell ourselves, and the power they have to spirit us to other worlds entirely. Buy Glorious Exploits: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/glorious-exploits*Ferdia Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and Libyan father. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. His short stories have appeared in publications such as the Irish Times and the Stinging Fly. In 2019 and 2021, he received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our guest this week is Roxy Dunn, whose debut novel As Young As This is a meticulous examination of the lives and loves of young women today. Told, strikingly, in the second person, it is structured by the the succession of first boys, then men in the protagonist Margot’s life, and populated by dysfunctional friends and a wisecracking, but deeply caring family. As Young As This is as witty as it is sincere, as revealing as it is touching. Pandora Sykes said that “with glorious attention to detail and emotional fluency, Dunn charts the ways in which we are built and broken by love” while Daisy Buchanan called As Young As This 'Raw, funny and beautiful” adding that it’s a “really gorgeously observed novel about youth and womanhood”Buy As Young As This: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/as-young-as-this*Roxy Dunn is a Writer/Performer and graduate of the BBC Comedy Writersroom. She’s acted in multiple television sitcoms and her shows have received sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and SOHO Theatre. Her scripts have been optioned by several production companies and her pilot Useless Millennials was commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As Young as This is her first novel.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

School of Instructions, the latest work by Ishion Hutchinson, draws from the time he spent in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, to foreground the experience—brutal, significant, but long overlooked—of West Indian volunteers in the First World War. This book length poem is a sensorial voyage into the convoys, garrisons and trenches of the Middle Eastern war theatre in all its monstrousness and disorientation, in which Ishion Hutchinson masterfully deploys his immense gift for spiriting vivid, textured, and living images from the page. The poem also juxtaposes the horror of war with the life of Godspeed, an ordinary—by which I mean mischievous and sweet-natured—boy growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. And it is perhaps this interweaving of narratives, of epochs, of worlds, of the micro and the macro, that makes School of Instructions not just a significant work of poetry, but also an important act of historical empathy, reaching back more than a century to highlight how the ossified remains of empire continue to distort the lives of the people of once colonised lands. School of Instructions—which was shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize—is a profound, affecting book, quite unlike any other work of poetry.Buy School of Instructions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/school-of-instructions*Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among honors.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Michael Donkor whose new novel Grow Where They Fall is a meticulous and tender exploration of two formative moments in the life of one Kwame Akromah, twenty years apart. Kwame is Black, Gay, British of Ghanian descent, a dedicated teacher, a dependable friend—character traits and conditions of life that weave around each other and interact, with unpredictable results—whether for the ten-year old boy or the grown man—at times lifting Kwame up, at other times dragging him down. Grow Where They Fall manages to be as gentle as it is spirited, as moving as is fun to read, and Donkor handles the changing register of life, and of London, in these different decades, with skill and verve. It is a book not just about growing up, and perhaps growing old, but also, in a sense, about growing out — growing out of the roles handed down to us by our families, growing out of friendships, growing out of jobs, and growing out of our own fixed ideas about ourselves. It’s also a book which asks the essential human question: Is it ever really possible to know where we are going without first knowing where we have come from?Buy Grow Where They Fall: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/grow-where-they-fall*Michael Donkor was born in London in 1985. He was raised in a Ghanaian household where talking lots and reading lots were vigorously encouraged. Michael read English at Oxford where he developed a particular interest in the works of Woolf, Lessing and Achebe, and later undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Michael worked in publishing for a number of years, but eventually decided to put his literary enthusiasms to other uses: in 2010, he retrained as an English teacher, teaching A-Level students, trying to develop a curious excitement about books and storytelling within his students. He now lives in Portugal, where he works as a bookseller. In 2014 Michael was selected by Writers Centre Norwich for their Inspires Mentoring Scheme, and worked with mentor Daniel Hahn. His first novel, HOLD, which explores Ghanaian heritage and questions surrounding sexuality, identity and sacrifice, was published by 4th Estate in 2018, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prizes. Michael was also selected by Scottish Poet Laureate Jackie Kay as one of the most important contemporary British BAME authors. He has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, BBC Radio 3, the TLS and the Independent. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The seven stories in Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses are not just about houses—how they contain us, how they constrain us—but are also about the families compressed in them, the objects stored in them, the neighbours that circle them…and the trauma that has soaked into their walls over years past, and that is now seeping slowly out, poisoning the lives of their inhabitants.Buy Seven Empty Houses: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/seven-empty-houses-2Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections and two novels, which have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017, and her short-story collection Seven Empty Houses won the National Book Award for Translated Literature 2022. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So much has been written about the imminent transformation that Artificial Intelligence will bring to our world. But it is often hard to get much of a sense of what that will mean on a personal level—for our work, for our leisure and, perhaps most importantly of all, for our families. What improvements will result? What new tensions will arise? What devastation will be wrought? In HUM, Helen Phillips takes these questions and masterfully dramatises them in the lives of a financially struggling family of four. As we spend time with mother May, father Jem, and kids Lu and Cy, we not only experience the very real, very claustrophobic presence of this invasive, dehumanising technology, but are also forced to reckon with the truly thorny question of whether some of the gifts it offers—foremost among them reassurance concerning the wellbeing of those we love—are a worthy altar upon which to sacrifice…well, pretty everything else. Just as with her much celebrated 2019 novel THE NEED, in HUM Helen Phillips has once again used the lens of deeply compelling speculative fiction to help us better understand the world as it changes around us. *Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including the novel The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019; Chatto & Windus, 2019), which was long-listed for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. Her novel HUM is forthcoming in August 2024 (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books). Helen's short story collection Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016) received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) was named a notable collection by The Story Prize and was re-released in 2023. She is also the author of the children’s eco-adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012).Helen has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, and the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award.Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times, among others. Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, and Spanish.A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson, their children, and their dog.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We recently welcomed Catherine Lacey to the bookshop to discuss her vertiginous latest novel Biography of X.Ostensibly the quest of a journalist, C.M. Lucca, to discover more about the life of her late wife—an artist who went by many names, but who she knew only as X—it quickly becomes clear that, in Biography of X, it’s not just one life being called into question, but a genre of literature, a method of reading, a manner of telling stories, a concept of history, perhaps even truth itself.Buy Biography of X here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/biography-of-x-5*Catherine Lacey is the author of four books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, Pew, and Biography of X. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Vogue, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is a Granta Best of Young American Novelist, a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of the 2021 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Set in small-town, post-crash Ireland, The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family—Dickie, Imelda, Cass and PJ—as the fabric of their lives first frays at the edges, then begins to unravel completely. The Barnes’ are endearing, and complex, and funny, and infuriating… In short, one of the most realistic and memorable portrayals of a family you’ll find in contemporary fiction.Throughout the book The Bee Sting’s focus masterfully expands and contracts between the minutiae of adolescent friendship, marital tensions and financial woes, and the threat of full scale global apocalypse, while touching on pretty much everything in between.It is a book about families, how they build you up and how they knock you down, about how both the lived past and the imagined future weigh on our lives, about coincidence, about loneliness, about optimism, about love and loss, about climate change, and about shame… it’s also a book, unsurprisingly, about bees—although perhaps not in the way that you might think.Buy The Bee Sting: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-bee-sting-3*Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975 and is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, The Mark and the Void and The Bee Sting. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void won the Everyman Wodehouse Prize. The Bee Sting won the Nero Book of the Year Award and the An Post Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Writers’ Prize for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Paul Murray lives in Dublin.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A woman tells her son about his early life. About the months and years that he will by now have forgotten. When he was a baby, then a toddler, and when she was going into battle every day. For him first, and only then for herself. It’s a battle fought on many fronts. Against exhaustion, against time, against the loss of selfhood, against an increasingly absent husband, and against a society that values women less than men, and perhaps mothers least of all. And with no guarantee that she, that they, will come out on top. Between a testimony and a confession, between a lesson and a warning to the man her boy will become Soldier Sailor is devastating, uplifting, punishing, galvanising, vertiginous, infuriating, honest, raw, painful, and illuminating…in short, as close a representation of the early days of parenthood that can be committed to words. Bu Soldier Sailor here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/soldier-sailor-2Clare Kilroy's debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as compelling... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed. Educated at Trinity College, she lives In Dublin.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The biographies of several artists, all named G, form a kind of exoskeleton to Rachel Cusk’s latest novel Parade, encasing the book’s other captivating strands—the story of an unprovoked attack on a Parisian street, the story of a couple on a remote island, the story of a suicide at a museum, the story of the death of a mother. Elements which themselves are arranged into four sections—The Stuntman, The Midwife, The Diver and The Spy—that, set down beside each other, interact and converse thematically, philosophically, but also alchemically, like a kind of a very contemporary, and very Cuskian take on the Tarot. Parade is a novel that uncovers and disrupts systems of control on every scale—from systems of individual thought, to the systems of familial hegemony, to systems of societal oppression. It’s also beautifully intricate, strikingly forthright and, at times, startlingly funny. In conversation with Adam Biles.Buy Parade: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/parade-2Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and non-fiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow. She lives in Paris.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week we were joined in the bookshop by Hari Kunzru, whose new novel Blue Ruin is a deeply unsettling, and intensely thought provoking reflection on the impact capital has on people, but also on art, and those who create it. It is the perfect final instalment—alongside White Tears and Red Pill—in Hari Kunzru’s own trois couleurs —a loose trilogy that has taken the temperature of our modern world, and found it to be profoundly unwell.Buy Blue Ruin here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/blue-ruin*HARI KUNZRU is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week we were joined by the wonderful Sheila Heti to celebrate the launch of her Alphabetical Diaries. In taking a decade of her journals, sorting the sentences alphabetically, then paring them down to about a tenth of their original length, Sheila Heti has freed a slice of her life from the shackles of time and in doing so has extracted some other, deeper kind of meaning from it. Alphabetical Diaries is a work that provokes vertiginous reflections on the construction of the self; that reveals how our psychological ticks and day-to-day fixations weigh heavily on our lives; that leads us to reconsider how we see, treat, judge and misjudge our friends and lovers; and that even makes us question how the book as an object works. In conversation with Adam Biles.Buy Alphabetical Diaries: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/alphabetical-diaries-2*Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the New Classics of the twenty-first century. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Alphabetical Diaries is her first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To celebrate Dylan Thomas Day 2024 we’re delighted to share this recording of our recent event with award-winning songwriter, author and broadcaster Cerys Matthews. The evening also featured live music from Flora Hibberd and her band, including a brand new song composed for this evening. Enjoy!More from Cerys Matthews:Out of Chaos Comes Bliss: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/out-of-chaos-comes-blissUnder Milk Wood: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/cerys-matthews-under-milk-woodTwitter: https://twitter.com/cerysmatthewsMore from Flora Hibberd:Bandcamp: https://flora-hibberd.bandcamp.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/florahibberd/Twitter: https://twitter.com/FloraHibberd*Cerys Matthews currently hosts and programmes award winning radio shows on BBC 6 music, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4; the Prix Italia and Prix Europa winning ‘Add to Playlist’.'Where the Wild Cooks Go’ was published by Penguin- it’s an acclaimed ‘folk’ cook book which celebrates recipes, music, poetry, proverbs and history across 15 countries, and, again on Penguin, her singalong book - ‘Hook, Line and Singer’, was a Sunday Times bestseller. She’s been collecting music and poems since she was a child growing up in South Wales and received an MBE and St David award for her services to culture. Cerys was a founder member of million selling band Catatonia, is a vice-president for Shelter, president of CPRW, The Welsh Countryside Charity and patron of the Dylan Thomas Society and Ballet Cymru.Flora Hibberd was born in London. In 2022 she signed with American label 22Twenty, and in 2023 recorded her first studio album in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with producer Shane Leonard and longtime collaborator Victor Claass. The album, 'Swirl', will be released in 2024. She lives in Paris.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few weeks ago, we welcomed Pulitzer Prizewinner Viet Thanh Nguyen to Shakespeare and Company to discuss his engrossing new work A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, a book about family, and memory, and storytelling, and history, on all the levels that it impacts upon a life.Buy A Man of Two Faces here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-man-of-two-faces*The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwideWith insight, humour, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thu?t and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn M?i, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.Resonant in its emotions and clear in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.*Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3wPhoto by Hugo Clair Torregrosa (c) Shakespeare and Company Paris  Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few weeks ago we welcomed Ottessa Moshfegh to Shakespeare and Company. That night we’re headed almost back to where it all began by revisiting Moshfegh’s second book Eileen, the small town noir that propelled this experimental writer into the bestseller charts and onto the Booker shortlist. Eileen has just been adapted into a Hollywood film—directed by William Oldroyd, starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie, and with a screenplay by Moshfegh and her partner Luke Goebel. So as well as diving into the book—reconnecting with the fresh, smart-mouthed, enchantingly twisted voice of our eponymous narrator—we also discussed the challenges of bringing that voice to the screen, what it felt like to see Eileen embodied, and the difficulty Moshfegh faced—if any— in handing her over to other artists…Buy Eileen here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/eileen-2*Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona, her next three novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3wPhoto by Hugo Clair Torregrosa (c) Shakespeare and Company Paris  Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James—the new novel by Percival Everett—retells, reframes, and reimagines Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the black man whose flight from slavery quickly entangles with the journey of Huck, on the run after faking his own death to escape his violent father. James gives us the events of Twain’s picaresque from a vital new standpoint—opening up previously unexplored plains of character consciousness as it does so—expanding and subverting the original story. And the novel doesn’t just fill in the blanks about Jim’s movements when our protagonists are separated, but also wrests the narrative arc itself in new and astonishing directions.Buy James here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/james-4*The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .From the shadows of Huck Finn’s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.*Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We were joined by countercultural historian Pat Thomas, and Peter Hale, manager of the Ginsberg estate, and discover their new collaboration Material Wealth Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg.*A prolific poet, raconteur, activist, and thinker, Allen Ginsberg was also a prolific collector, meticulously saving letters, postcards, draft notes and manuscripts, photographs and snapshots, appearance bills and rally broadsheets, not only featuring him personally, but also his fellow poets, singers, lovers, writers, journey companions, friends, and agitators. Gathered here publicly for the first time is his personal archive of events and experiences documenting his life as a young man, breakaway poet, expansive spirit, curious intellectual traveler, and relentless enthusiast of the provocative and the profane.There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored and archived at Stanford University’s Allen Ginsberg collection. Counterculture historian Pat Thomas, with the full cooperation of the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Peter Hale, has compiled and annotated a remarkable volume of material, unearthing in the process one astounding find after another. The result is a tome of previously unpublished historical paperwork and vintage graphics and photographs and ephemera that promises an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century.*Pat Thomas is a counterculture historian and archival music producer (and liner-note writer) whose expertise and interests have helped him author such books as Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975 and Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary. He has co-curated Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980, co-edited My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed, an anthology of interviews about the iconic musician, and contributed to The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane: The Long Lost Rock n’ Roll Detective and Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack. Thomas was a consultant on the PBS documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and compiled the 3-CD box set The Last Word on First Blues for the Allen Ginsberg Estate (1970s recordings of Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Arthur Russell), and the 2-CD set Songs of Innocence and Experience of Ginsberg’s 1969 recordings (with Don Cherry and Elvin Jones) putting William Blake poems to music with vocals by Allen.Peter Hale grew up in Italy, Germany, and then Boulder, CO where he earned a BA in Classics, Greek & Latin, from the University of Colorado, all the while attending classes in music, poetry and meditation at Naropa University. He became part of the staff at Allen Ginsberg’s office in 1992, and in 1997 helped craft his posthumous estate, which he currently manages. He studied Guitar with Dave Van Ronk & Danny Kalb, and Piano with Peter Barbieri. He currently produces his own music, and djs around NYC. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this very special January night, editor extraordinaire John Freeman was joined by three of his star contributors, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and Deborah Landau to bid farewell to his literary journal.Buy Freeman’s Conclusions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/freemans-conclusions*Jakuta Alikavazovic (b.1979) is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her first novel, Corps Volatils (2008) won the Goncourt Prize for Best First Novel and her second and third novels, Le Londres-Luxor (2010) and La Blonde et Le Bunker (2012) won prizes in France and Italy. Her most recent novel, Night as it Falls (L’Avancee de la Nuit), was published by Faber in 2020. Her essay Comme un Ciel en Nous (Like a Sky in Us) won the Prix Medicis Essai 2021 and her collected newspaper columns Faites Un Voeu (Make a Wish) were published in 2022. She is working on a new novel to be delivered in 2023.Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the author of 8 works of fiction, including the award-winning The Sound of Things Falling, The Shape of the Ruins and Retrospective. His work is published in 30 languages.Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons. Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, as well as Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing ProgramJohn Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s and the author and editor of a dozen books, including Wind, Trees, Dictionary of the Undoing, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Orion, and been translated into over twenty languages. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York City, where he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf and hosts the monthly California Book Club -- a free online discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature -- for Alta magazine.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In early February, we hosted a riotous, tender, enchanting and uplifting evening of poetry and prose with the irrepressible Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen. After their readings they sat down with Adam Biles for a chat about friendship, a theme that unites their work.Buy Hollie McNish’s Lobster here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/lobsterBuy Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/boy-friends-2*Hollie McNish is a poet, author and lover based between Glasgow and Cambridge. She won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her poetic parenting memoir – Nobody Told Me – of which The Scotsman stated ‘the world needs this book’. She has published four further lovely collections of poetry –Papers, Cherry Pie, Plum, and Slug, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was published in French by Le Castor Astral under the title Je souhaite seulement que tu fasses quelque chose de toi. Her new book, Lobster and other things I'm learning to love, is out now and according to her dad is 'her best work yet'. She loves writing.Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, and the Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 to rave reviews and was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. He’s unfurled three collections of poetry, the most recent being The Cat Prince & Other Poems—which won the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Poetry 2023. Pedersen has been shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and The Saltire National Book Awards, and won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. His work has attracted praise from the likes of: Stephen Fry, Irvine Welsh, Kae Tempest, Jackie Kay, Sara Pascoe, Nicola Sturgeon & many more.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our guest this week is Brandon Taylor, whose new book The Late Americans is a stark retooling of the campus novel for the 21st century. Taking a university town in Iowa as his canvas, Taylor depicts the lives of a loose group of friends and associates: Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima—students of writing and dance—as time barrels them towards the end of their studies and the harsh realities of the so-called “real” world beyond. The novel lives in Taylor’s delicate and perceptive handling of the complicated interplay of money, class, race, art and sex—the bonds each of these can form between us and the divides they create. It is a book rich in ideas and reflections about contemporary life, contemporary America in particular, but these would all be for nothing without the meticulously wrought human comedy—in all its beauty and ugliness—at its core.Buy The Late Americans: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-late-americansBrandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week, we were joined in the bookshop by Annabelle Hirsch whose new book A History of Women in 101 Objects not only gives us an untold and innovative history of the world— a history takes us from the dawn of civilisation to the present day, through ancient Egypt, medieval Venice, revolutionary France and the roaring twenties—but also launches an interrogation into the practice and the purpose of history itself: how and why it’s told, who gets to tell it, and what gets cast into the shadows along the way. Buy A History of Women in 101 Objects: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-history-of-women-in-101-objectsAnnabelle Hirsch, born in 1986, has German and French roots. She studied art history, dramatics and philosophy in Munich and Paris, and works as a cultural journalist for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and various other magazines. She writes short stories and translates French literature. She lives between Rome and Berlin.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In advance of their event at Shakespeare and Company this February 8th, poets Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen answer our café’s Proust Questionnaire. Be warned, this gets saucy quickly…Find out more about their event here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/events/hollie-mcnish-michael-pedersen*Hollie McNish is an award-winning poet, writer and performer.She is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Slug (and other things I’ve been told to hate) and won the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry with her poetry and parenting memoir Nobody Told Me. She has two further poetry collections, Plum and Cherry Pie, one modern adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone and alongside fellow poet Sabrina Mahfouz, co-wrote Offside, a play relating the history of UK women’s football. She loves writing and her live readings are not to be missed.Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, and the current Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. He’s published three acclaimed collections of poetry, with the title poem from his third, The Cat Prince & Other Poems, currently shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prizes. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 to rave reviews in the UK and North America and was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. Pedersen has won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and John Mather’s Trust Rising Star of Literature Award. His work has attracted praise from the likes of Stephen Fry, Kae Tempest, Irvine Welsh, Shirley Manson, Maggie Smith and many more. He also co-founded the prize-winning literary collective Neu! Reekie!.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our Bloomcasters reconvene on January 6th, “Joycension Day”, to discuss The Dead : the final piece in Joyce’s Dubliners, described by T. S. Eliot as "one of the greatest short stories ever written". Leaning heavily as always on the wisdom of honorary Bloomcasters Declan Kiberd and Colm Toibin, they cover orchestrated dinner parties, ego death, the circularity of human life, the music of words, and much more.Carrying forth a Bloomcast tradition, they also play a festive game, populating competing dinner parties with characters from Dubliners and Ulysses.Happy New Year (and Joycension Day)!*Mentioned in the podcast:‘The Dead’, by James Joyce: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dubliners/The_DeadProf. Declan Kiberd, ‘Dubliners: The First 100 Years,’ at the James Joyce Center (2014):https://youtu.be/A5qhK7LH6co?si=1zFc7EH7AOpuL1mqDubliners, with an introduction by Colm Toibin (Canongate): https://canongate.co.uk/books/1488-dubliners/London Review of Books. ‘Arruginated’, by Colm Toibin: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n17/colm-toibin/arruginatedJohn Huston’s 1987 film adaptation of ‘The Dead’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkos62UPwVk“The Lass of Aughrim,” from the Huston film:https://youtu.be/I1CP5Lz2iHE?si=yfxE-koZ3PVngWIcAnnie Baker’s Infinite Life: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/infinite-life/ Circles by Ralph Waldo Emerson: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2944/2944-h/2944-h.htm#link2H_4_0010  *Alice McCrum is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Princeton University. Before starting her graduate work, Alice lived in Paris, where she taught at the Sorbonne, studied public policy at Sciences Po-Paris, and directed cultural programming at the American Library in Paris. Lex Paulson is Director of Executive Programs at the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence (Morocco) and lectures in advocacy and human rights at Sciences Po-Paris. Trained in classics and community organizing, he served as mobilization strategist for the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He served as legislative counsel in the 111th U.S. Congress (2009-2011), organized on six U.S. presidential campaigns, and has worked to advance democratic innovation at the European Commission and in India, Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda, Senegal, Czech Republic and Ukraine. He is author of Cicero and the People’s Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic, from Cambridge University Press, and is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance.Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. In 2022, he conceived and presented Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses—an epic, polyphonic celebration of James Joyce’s masterwork. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2016. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel, Beasts of England, was published in September 2023 by Galley Beggar Press, and will be published in 2025 by Editions Grasset. It was selected as a "2023 highlight" by The Guardian. A collection of his conversations with writers, The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews, was published by Canongate in October 2023 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode we’re discussing The Possessed, the great, almost-lost novel by Witold Gombrowicz, arguably Poland’s greatest modernist writer. The Possessed is a Gothic-infused romp set in the roaring twenties, centred around an uncanny love story between Maja, an upper class tennis player, and her coach Leszczuk, but also featuring a haunted castle, lost treasure, and a mad prince…as every good Gothic novel should.It has been published by Fitzcarraldo in a lively and highly-readable translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and with a sharp-witted and insightful introduction by Adam Thirlwell, who join us to discuss it. Buy The Possessed: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-possessed-2*Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland's leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children's books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize.Adam Thirlwell is the author of four novels. His work has been translated into thirty languages, while his awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Adam is joined by Naomi Klein, whose new book, Doppelganger is somehow both the most personal and the most all-encompassing of her works to date. Beginning with the highly destabilising, but very intimate experience of repeatedly being mistaken for someone else—someone whose beliefs are, in most respects, fundamentally different to Klein’s—it expands into a penetrating analysis of the “Mirror World”—that place populated with rightwing agitators, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and wellness influencers which, if you squint just the right amount, can end up looking not too dissimilar to your everyday reality.Buy Doppelganger here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/doppelganger-2*Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and international and New York Times bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed books: How To Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Earth and Each Other (2021), On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019), No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000). In 2018, she published The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists (2018) reprinted from her feature article for The Intercept with all royalties donated to Puerto Rican organisation juntegente.org. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Adam is joined by Claire-Louise Bennett for a wide-ranging conversation, orbiting around Nightflowers, her immersive installation at Museum of Literature Ireland. They discuss writing, thought processes, class, Huysmans, Ann Quin, the imagination, home, the poetics of space . . . and much, much more.Find out more about Nightflowers here: https://moli.ie/nightflowers/*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. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Set in a near future in which a mysterious smog has enveloped the world, devastating crops and biodiversity, the narrator of Land of Milk and Honeytakes a job as a chef at an isolated mountain colony, run by a wealthy entrepreneur and his daughter, a visionary scientist. However, what she first takes to be little more than a decadent end-times holiday camp for the perennially wealthy, she soon discovers is much more ambitious, and potentially much more sinister.Buy Land of Milk and Honey: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/land-of-milk-and-honey-3Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, nominated for the Booker Prize, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo Ann Beard’s essays are surprising, insightful, thoughtful, and contains something new in each and every sentence. Recently published in the UK as The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard they combine the stylistic flair and pace of fiction, with the ineffable weight of the factual, creating in the reader a rare and profound sense of empathy. 'Too good... You should read her and not look away' Anne Enright, Guardian'The stories are essays, the essays are stories. Even when they are not literally true, they contain the kind of truth that great fiction thrives on' The Times'Literature's best kept secret' IndependentBuy The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-collected-works-of-jo-ann-beardBuy Cheri: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/cheri-3Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and others, and has received a Whiting Foundation Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you thought life on Airstrip one was tough for Winston Smith, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Because in JULIA, Sandra Newman’s reimagining of Orwell’s nightmare, if men have it hard, you can bet women have it harder. Taking the roughly sketched character of Julia—Winston’s love interest and possible betrayer—Sandra Newman gives her a surname, a history, a life of her own. In short, she breathes a soul into her. And in doing so, not only does she allow readers to revisit 1984 with new eyes but creates a novel that stands tall in its own terrifying pair of jackboots.Buy Julia: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/julia-3SANDRA NEWMAN is the author of The Country of Ice Cream Star (Longlisted for the Women's Prize), The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done (shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award), Cake, The Heavens and The Men. She is a graduate of the University of East Anglia Creative Writing programme and lives in New York.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode Adam is joined by John Freeman to bid farewell to his game-changing literary journal Freeman’s. They discuss the pleasures and challenges faced in setting up and running a magazine John’s editorial philosophy, some of his favourite events, and why the final issue’s theme of “Conclusions” offers up more surprising avenues than readers might expect. The episode also features readings from Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Rebecca Makkai, and Mieko Kawakami read by translator Hitomi YoshioBuy Freeman’s Conclusions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/freemans-conclusionsFeaturing new work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Louise Erdrich, Mieko Kawakami and more, the tenth and final instalment of the boundary-pushing literary journal Freeman's explores all the ways of coming to an end.John Freeman was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include Dictionary of the Undoing, How to Read a Novelist, Tales of Two Americas, and Tales of Two Planets. His poetry includes the collections Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. In 2021, he edited the anthologies There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love with Tracy K. Smith, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. An executive editor at Knopf, he also hosts the California Book Club, a monthly online discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature for Alta magazine. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review and has been translated into twenty-two languages.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Adam was joined in the writer’s studio by Marie Darrieussecq, whose latest book Sleepless (translated by Penny Hueston and published by Fitzcarraldo) is one writer’s attempt to describe, understand, and perhaps overcome her insomnia. The passages in Sleepless that take us into the mind of the insomniac are somewhat like the experience of insomnia itself— at times fragmented and hynopgogic, at others dazzlingly alert and perceptive—while those that investigate the potential cures are captivating in their detail, description and weirdness. For those whose lives have never been blighted by insomnia, Sleepless will be a fascinating insight into this strangest and most psychologically traumatic of conditions, while those who have suffered it will find in these pages solidarity and solace.Buy Sleepless: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/sleepless-5Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and is recognized as one of the leading voices of contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has written more than twenty books. Text has published Tom Is Dead, All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby and Crossed Lines. In 2013 Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men. She has written art criticism and journalism for a number of publications, including Libération and Charlie Hebdo, and is also a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. She lives in Paris.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week our host switches chairs to discuss his new novel, Beasts of England, a state-of-the-farmyard novel about back-stabbers, truth-twisters and corrupt charlatans.Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england*Manor Farm has reinvented itself as the South of England’s premium petting zoo. Now, instead of a working farm, humans and beasts alike areinvited (for a small fee) to come and stroke, fondle, and take rides on the farm’s inhabitants.But life is not a bed of roses for the animals, in spite of what their leaders may want them to believe. Elections are rigged, the community is beset by factions, and sacred mottos are being constantly updated. The Farm is descending into chaos. What’s more, a mysterious ‘illness’ has started ripping through the animals, killing them one by one…In Beasts of England, Adam Biles honours, updates and subverts George Orwell’s classic, all the while channelling the chaotic, fragmentary nature of populist politics in the Internet age into a savage farmyard satire.*Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, from where he hosts their weekly podcast. In 2022, he conceived and presented Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses—an epic, polyphonic celebration of James Joyce’s masterwork. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2016, and was chosen by The Guardian as a Fiction Pick for 2016 and was a book of the year for The Observer, The Irish Times, The Millions and 3:AM Magazine. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel, Beasts of England, will be published in September 2023 by Galley Beggar Press, and in 2025 by Editions Grasset. It was selected as a "2023 highlight" by The Guardian. A collection of his conversations with writers, The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews, will be published by Canongate in October 2023.Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’. Doyle has adapted it for film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle also has a published collection of short stories; This is the Ritual. Doyle is the editor of the anthology The Other Irish Tradition and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. His newest book Threshold will be published in 2020. He teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Buy Emerald Wounds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/emerald-woundsJoyce Mansour was a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt whose fierce, macabre, erotically charged works gave André Breton’s Surrealist group a much-needed jolt after the ravages of the Second World War. Among new adherents, only Mansour wrote poems commensurate with those of Robert Desnos, René Char, Benjamin Pêret, and other poets from the movement’s heyday.Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour is a compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology of this incendiary poet. With a biographical introduction by translator Emilie Moorhouse, who was drawn to Mansour’s tough, take-no-prisoners stance during the societal reckoning of the #MeToo movement, Emerald Wounds showcases the entire arc of her trajectory as a poet, from the at-once gothic and minimalist fragments of her first collection in 1953, Screams, to the serpentine power of her final poems of the 1980s. Juxtaposing the original French poems with their English translations, Mansour’s voice surges forward uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society that sees women as superficial objects of desire rather than multidimensional, autonomous subjects. Mansour is a poet the world needs today. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark O’Connell’s new book A Thread of Violence is the writer’s attempt to understand Malcolm MacArthur, the figure at the centre of one of Ireland’s most notorious crimes, and — to quote Taoiseach Charles Haughey — the “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented” events that led to the perpetrator’s eventual arrest in the home of the Irish Attorney General. It is a crime that has haunted O’Connell for decades and which leads him to meeting and getting to know the now elderly, long-freed MacArthur. As this unlikely acquaintance grows, however, O’Connell not only comes to question the possibility of ever coming to any conclusion about what actually drove this previously law-abiding local eccentric to murder two strangers in the summer of 1982, but also calls into doubt his own motivations for embarking on the project in the first place, and the risks he is taking in his own life to complete it.Buy A Thread of Violence: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-thread-of-violenceMark O'Connell is an award-winning Irish writer. His first book, To Be a Machine, won the 2018Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019, he became the firstever non-fiction writer to win the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second book,Notes From an Apocalypse was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He is a contributor to the NewYork Review of Books, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker.Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Set, ostensibly, in revolutionary France, The Future Future follows Celine from young womanhood as she navigates the shifting landscape—which is being transformed as much by new media, new ways of doing business, and the discovery of new territories, as by the various political insurrections. It is a novel about how women survive in a world wrought by male violence, about language—how it shapes us and how we’re shaped by it—about friendship, about power, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title: about time.Buy The Future Future: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-future-futureAdam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs was first published ten years ago, self-published in fact, and quickly became a phenomenon. Ostensibly about the reasons why, in August 1994, the remnants one of the most successful, if esoteric, pop bands on the planet would torch 20 thousand 50 pound notes on the Scottish island of Jura, John Higgs quickly finds himself obliged to veer off piste — into the worlds of punk, rave, Dada, magic, Discordianism, alchemy, numerology and the very fabric of reality itself. Republished now with added reflective footnotes The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds is as wild a ride as you would want from a book about the playful, chaotic, duo at the heart of the band. Not only that, but it might also reveal what Higgs calls “one of the most important philosophical leaps of the twentieth century”…Buy The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-klfJohn Higgs is the author I HAVE AMERICA SURROUNDED, THE KLF, STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE, WATLING STREET, THE FUTURE STARTS HERE, WILLIAM BLAKE NOW, WILLIAM BLAKE VS THE WORLD and LOVE AND LET DIE. He lives in Brighton with his wife and their two children. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Buy Up Late: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/up-lateReeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the book's heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved. Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden. There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. But there is great tenderness, too, a fondness for what grows between the cracks, especially those glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, before the knowledge or accumulation of loss, where everything is still at stake and infinite, 'the darkness under the cattle grid'.Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic and former lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unique in its inventiveness, unique in its prose style, unique in its point of view and unique in its sense of humour, Isabel Waidner’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is a reading experience like no other. is it a mind-bending science fiction romp through uncountable dimensions? Is it an examination of how cultural artefacts shape us and are reshaped by us? Is it a cutting satire of the British class system? Is it one person’s singular quest to come to terms with themself? Is it a hilarious and painfully on target parody of the literary world? Or Is it, even, a love story? Listen on the find out…Buy Corey Fah Does Social Mobility: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/corey-fah-does-social-mobilityIsabel Waidner is a writer based in London. They are the author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Sterling Karat Gold, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and Gaudy Bauble. They are the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2021 and were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022. They are a co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and they are an academic in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week, Adam chaired a conversation between Ben Lerner and Jakuta Alikavazovic, on the writing and translating of The Topeka School, at the conference BEN LERNER - EDGE OF GENRE. The discussion was compelling, enlightening and hilarious in equal measure. Enjoy!Buy The Topeka School: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-topeka-schoolBen Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.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 Liberation.*Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is the testament of Sonia—a horse trainer, a racetracker—who tells her story in taut vignettes, each of which contains more person, more world, more life, than a dozen pages of most contemporary novels. And what a world it is. Bruising, and brutal, where physical pain and severe injury are commonplace, a world shaped by violence and addiction, a tight-knit itinerant world of trainers, grooms, jockeys, owners, gamblers, racing secretaries, vets, and, of course—at the centre of it all—those enormous, enigmatic, empathetic beasts . . . horses.A work of fiction, based on interviews with a real-life Sonia, Kick the Latch thrums with a kind of hyper-authenticity, cracking open a closed society, placing a marginal life at its centre, and provoking a profound resonance between Sonia’s very specific struggles and joys and our own.Buy Kick the Latch: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/kick-the-latchKathryn Scanlan is the author of The Dominant Animal and lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in NOON, Granta and Fence, and is forthcoming in The Paris Review. Her story ‘The Old Mill’ was selected by Michael Cunningham for the 2010 Iowa Review Fiction Prize. She has degrees in painting, writing, and English from the University of Iowa and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her debut novel, AUG 9—FOG, a literary adaptation of a found diary, was published by FSG in 2019.Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few weeks back we had our dear friend, Bloomsday MC, and eminent Bloomcaster Prof. Lex Paulson as a guest in the library to give a talk on Cicero, drawing on his book Cicero and the People’s Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic, recently published by Cambridge University Press.Anyone who has listened to Bloomcast will know that Lex is not just a great speaker, but also a great thinker, and this talk is both an exquisite example of his work, and an insight into some of the ideas that shaped his particular and insightful approach to James Joyce’s masterwork.We were so pleased to have Lex with us that evening, and are delighted to be able to release this talk on Bloomsday. Enjoy! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.