Shakespeare And Company

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

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 a

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

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.

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 co

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

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 I

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

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,

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

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 Wh

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 no

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 M

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

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

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 translation

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