Shakespeare And Company

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

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 h

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

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.

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

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

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 inhabitantsBuy 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

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 a

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

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:

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

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

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 Wr

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 ma

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

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 B

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

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

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 G

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 Th