Shakespeare And Company

Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Adam Biles speaks with Ben Lerner about his novel Transcription, a formally inventive meditation on technology, memory, and human connection.Beginning with the novel’s deceptively simple premise (a writer loses his recording device and reconstructs an interview from memory) the conversation expands into questions of mediation, voice, and authenticity. Lerner explores how devices reshape attention and relationships, suggesting that humans themselves function as “media,” transmitting voices across time and between generations.The discussion moves between the philosophical and the intimate: from the limits of digital communication to the emotional power of disembodied voices, from intergenerational care to the fragile transmission of experience. Ultimately, Transcription emerges as a reflection on how stories, memories, and voices persist—less as fixed recordings than as living, shifting acts of interpretation.Buy Transcription: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/book

Why Translate Homer Again? Daniel Mendelsohn on his new OdysseyThis conversation explore’s Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. Mendelsohn reflects on why this endlessly retranslated text still invites fresh interpretation, describing Odysseus as a “proto-author” whose storytelling shapes reality itself.The discussion delves into the craft of translation; balancing precision with poetic vitality, preserving the strangeness of Homeric Greek while remaining readable, and making deliberate choices about line length, diction, and even spelling. Mendelsohn also highlights the influence of teaching and lifelong engagement with the text, emphasising close reading and the role of students in deepening understanding.Beyond technique, the conversation explores why The Odyssey endures. its themes of homecoming, identity, storytelling, and time continue to resonate across generations, making it both an ancient epic and a strikingly modern work.Buy The Odyssey: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/boo

In this special edition, we revisit three conversations with Shakespeare and Company rare book dealer Ben Brown, originally recorded in 2022. Across these episodes, Ben guides us into the fascinating, often mysterious world of book collecting.We begin with the basics: what makes a first edition and how collectors identify them. Ben shares insights into the thrill of the hunt and the appeal of owning a first edition. Next, we explore the extraordinary publishing history of Ulysses, from censorship battles to rare early editions, revealing how controversy shaped its legacy. Finally, we turn to signed books, unpacking why an author’s signature adds emotional and monetary value—and how provenance can transform an object into a story.Discover our rare books collection here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/lists/rare-books Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Adam Biles speaks with Tash Aw about The South, his novel of inheritance, identity, and quiet upheaval. Set on a decaying farm in southern Malaysia, the story follows a family confronting generational fracture, class tension, and the uneasy weight of belonging. Aw explores how landscape is felt through the body rather than described, and how memory—fragmentary and unreliable—shapes narrative voice.The conversation covers adolescence, queer awakening, and the tension between freedom and fear when removed from social scrutiny. Aw reflects on writing from hindsight, the interplay between personal experience and fiction, and the ways families both sustain and constrain individual identity. Buy The South: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-south-7*TASH AW is the author of five novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won a Whitbread Award, a Commo

An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-david-szalayThis week Adam Biles sits down with Booker Prize–winner David Szalay to discuss his novel Flesh — a work that begins in post-Soviet Hungary and expands into a stark portrait of Europe over the last three decades.Szalay describes writing a book that takes almost nothing for granted, grounding experience in the physical body rather than psychology. They explore the novel’s emotionally charged yet morally unresolved relationships, its refusal of overt judgment, and its spare, withholding prose style.The conversation covers masculinity, violence, agency, and the seductive fantasy of “the West,” asking whether István is passive — or simply shaped by forces larger than himself. What happens when a novel resists explanation? When language reaches its limits? And how can restraint intensify emotional impact rather than dim

Recorded live in the bookshop, this conversation dives into the inventive world of Perspectives, Laurent Binet’s historical novel that transforms Renaissance Florence into the scene of a gripping whodunnit. The discussion explores how a real painter’s death becomes the catalyst for a dazzling literary experiment: a murder investigation told entirely through letters, gossip, and competing testimonies.The author reveals how the book blends meticulous archival research with narrative play—treating history not as a fixed record but as a puzzle assembled from partial truths. From the politics of ducal courts to the working lives of artists and artisans, the episode uncovers a city in creative and ideological upheaval, grappling with what comes after artistic perfection.At once detective story, art-history meditation, and sly reflection on storytelling itself, this is a lively exploration of how the past can feel startlingly contemporary—and how every account depends on who’s holding the pen.Buy Perspectives: https

George Saunders returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with host Adam Biles about Vigil, his long-awaited new novel. Set on the threshold between life and death, Vigil follows a dying oil executive and the ghost tasked with comforting him, unfolding as a darkly comic, morally urgent meditation on guilt, responsibility, and free will in the age of climate collapse.Saunders discusses his fascination with liminal spaces and afterlives, the technical challenges of writing beyond realism, and how revision allows fiction to think more deeply than polemic ever could. Drawing on his own past in the oil industry, he reflects on writing characters implicated in environmental harm with both empathy and moral seriousness. The conversation ranges across Dickens, Tolstoy, Buddhism, and the novel’s central question: whether redemption is possible when action is no longer an option. As ever, Saunders brings humor, generosity, and intellectual daring to a discussion that embraces complexity rather than easy an

In this wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful conversation, writer Emily LaBarge speaks with host Adam Biles about Dog Days, her groundbreaking new work of nonfiction. Rooted in the 2009 hostage event she and her family survived while on holiday in the Caribbean, the book explores not the incident itself but the psychic “mark” it left—its shape, depth, and resistance to narrative. Emily discusses the instability of storytelling after trauma, the pressure to produce coherent versions for police, insurers, or therapists, and the unsettling sense that the world itself had changed in the aftermath. She reflects on the limits of therapy, the body’s relationship to memory, and how literature, art, and cinema became “fellow travelers” in her attempt to understand the experience. Adam and Emily also consider genre, experiment, and the essay’s capacity to hold fractured thought. Dog Days emerges as a radical, erudite, and emotionally exacting exploration of what it means to live on after rupture.Buy Dog Days: https://www

In this episode, Adam Biles welcomes Jonathan Coe to Shakespeare and Company in Paris for a rich, funny, and wide-ranging conversation about Coe’s genre-bending novel The Proof of My Innocence. What begins as a playful pastiche of a cozy crime mystery evolves into three interlocking novellas—a whodunnit, a piece of dark academia, and a fragment of autofiction—that push at the limits of storytelling itself. Coe discusses why crime fiction offers comfort in anxious times, how the destabilising politics of late 2022 (from Liz Truss to the Queen’s death) seeped into the book, and why he’s increasingly drawn to overtly fictional narratives in an age suspicious of facts. He reflects on class, Cambridge, generational politics, and the powerful role fiction plays in preserving memory. Filled with humour and insight, the conversation offers both a defence of storytelling and a portrait of Britain in flux.Buy The Proof of My Innocence: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-proof-of-my-innocence-3Jonathan Coe

In this episode of the Shakespeare and Company Podcast, Adam Biles speaks with poet, translator and critic Ian Patterson about Books: A Manifesto, his passionate defence of reading in all its forms. What begins with the construction of a personal library in a converted coach house opens into a wide-ranging meditation on memory, loss, vulnerability and the profound role books play in shaping a life. Patterson discusses the anguish of parting with thousands of volumes, the intimacy of marked-up, well-lived-in books, and the politics of reading slowly in a culture addicted to speed. The conversation moves through genre snobbery, guilty pleasures, poetry’s complex rewards, the porous borders of contemporary literature, and Patterson’s experience translating the final volume of Proust—an immersion so deep it altered his own prose. It’s a warm, generous exploration of why books matter, how they remake us, and why defending them feels more urgent than ever.Buy Books: A Manifesto: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.co

In this live conversation at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, Adam Biles speaks with writer Ian Leslie about John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, Leslie’s acclaimed exploration of the creative and emotional bond at the heart of The Beatles. Together they trace John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s relationship from their first meeting as bereaved teenagers in Liverpool, through the crucible of Hamburg, the frenzy of Beatlemania, and the artistic revolutions of the 1960s. Leslie explains why their partnership was neither simple friendship nor sibling rivalry, but a passionate, volatile, and profoundly collaborative romance—one that shaped their music as much as their music shaped them. They discuss myth-making around the band’s breakup, why McCartney’s reputation took decades to recover, and how John and Paul remained “entangled particles” long after going their separate ways. A rich, moving conversation about genius, chemistry, and the power of creative partnership.Buy John & Paul, A Love Story in Songs:

In this intimate conversation recorded at Shakespeare and Company, novelist Miriam Robinson joins Adam Biles to discuss her remarkable debut, And Notre Dame Is Burning. Together, they explore the novel’s fractured structure and the emotional aftermath of betrayal, loss, and motherhood. Robinson reflects on her protagonist Esther—a woman piecing together the wreckage of a marriage through letters and fragments—as well as on grief, storytelling, and the disorientation of time. From the shadow of Notre Dame to the uncertainty of rebuilding a life, Robinson examines how women navigate love, autonomy, and the stories they tell themselves. Touching on subjects from miscarriage and memory to patriarchy and the politics of intimacy, this conversation balances literary craft with raw honesty.Buy And Notre Dame Is Burning: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/and-notre-dame-is-burning*Miriam Robinson is an author who has worked in the world of books and bookshops for over 15 years. Previously the host of podcast

An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-miriam-toewsTrigger warning: This is a tender, funny, and hopeful conversation, that inevitably touches on the subjects of suicide and depression. Please be advised before listening.In this moving and intimate discussion, Miriam Toews joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company to talk about her memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace. Beginning with the question “Why do I write?”, Toews embarks on a deeply personal exploration of creativity, doubt, family, and loss. She reflects on her Mennonite upbringing, the deaths of her father and sister, and the ways in which writing—and laughter—have helped her make sense of pain and love. With warmth, wit, and clarity, Toews examines the limits of narrative, the pull of silence, and the stubborn hope that persists in the face of despair. A meditation on grief, rebellion, and the meaning of h

In this episode recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, historian and cultural critic Andrew Hussey joins Adam Biles to discuss his powerful new book, Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation. With wit, erudition, and decades of on-the-ground insight, Hussey examines how France—once the model of revolutionary ideals and republican universalism—has splintered along social, cultural, and political lines. From the banlieues to the boulevards, from secularism to identity politics, Hussey traces the fractures that now define the French experience and asks whether the nation can still live up to its promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Their conversation moves between history, journalism, and personal reflection, exploring nationalism, colonial legacies, and the uneasy relationship between Paris and the rest of the country. Fractured France is both an elegy and a challenge: can a republic built on unity survive in an age of division?Buy Fractured France: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books

This week Adam Biles speaks with international lawyer and acclaimed author Philippe Sands about his latest book, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. Building on East West Street and The Ratline, Sands traces the remarkable and disturbing links between Nazi officer Walter Rauff—architect of the mobile gas vans—and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Their conversation explores how Rauff escaped Europe, settled in South America, and later became entangled with Pinochet’s regime, raising profound questions about memory, complicity, and justice. Sands also shares his personal and professional connection to this history: as a barrister involved in Pinochet’s extradition case, and as the descendant of a family decimated by the Holocaust. Blending archival detective work, courtroom drama, and encounters with extraordinary witnesses, Sands reveals the human stories behind the law. This is a gripping, moving, and sometimes unsettling dialogue about the echoes of history and the

In this conversation recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, travel writer Monisha Rajesh talks about her new book Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train. From Paris to Istanbul, Scotland to India, the United States to Lapland, Rajesh explores the romance and realities of sleeper trains—where the carriages, the landscapes, and above all, the people become the story. She shares how her love of rail travel began in India, why night trains are enjoying a resurgence amid the climate crisis, and what it means to travel as a woman, a mother, and a writer in a turbulent world. Alongside the practicalities of packing eye masks and hot water bottles, Rajesh reflects on the communities that form in dining cars, the unexpected intimacy of train travel, and the way technology, politics, and global events shape the journeys we take.Buy Moonlight Express: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/moonlight-expressMonisha Rajesh is a British journalist whose writing has appeared in Time magazine, the New Yor

In this special episode of the Shakespeare and Company Interview Podcast, we celebrate the paperback release of The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews (Canongate), a compelling collection of literary conversations recorded live at our bookshop in Paris. Capturing a decade of rich, revealing discussions, the episode revisits unforgettable moments with some of the world’s most acclaimed writers, exploring the craft of writing, the power of stories, and the electric atmosphere of bookshops. Expect insights into the creative process, unexpected moments of vulnerability, and reflections on how literature intersects with politics, identity, and the human condition. Featuring live clips and commentary, this episode is both a celebration and an invitation—to listen, to read, and to be part of the ongoing conversation.Buy The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-shakespeare-and-company-book-of-interviews-2Featuring…Percival EverettOlivia LaingMarlon JamesG

In this episode Adam speaks with translator Frank Wynne and Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin about the first-ever English edition of Mafalda, the beloved Argentine comic strip by Quino (Archipelago Books). Together, they explore how this precocious, principled six-year-old girl—who challenged everything from soup to capitalism—shaped generations of readers in Argentina and beyond. Frank discusses the joys and puzzles of translating Mafalda’s quick wit and political edge, while Samanta recalls how the strip introduced her to feminism, philosophy, and satire as a child. The conversation touches on cartooning as subversion, and why Mafalda’s questions still matter today. Whether you're meeting Mafalda for the first time or grew up with her, this episode is a moving celebration of one of the 20th century's most enduring comic heroines.Buy Mafalda: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/mafalda-3*Samanta Schweblin won the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her story collection, Seven E

Katharina Volckmer joins Adam Biles to discuss her biting, bleakly funny second novel, Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes. Set in a London call centre, the book follows Jimmie, a disillusioned former actor trapped in a soul-crushing job, a suffocating home life with his immigrant mother, and an alienating body. Volckmer discusses the novel’s inspirations—from her own time in call centres to reflections on work, class, intimacy, and the dehumanising effects of late capitalism. They explore Jimmie’s idiosyncratic voice, his desire for connection, and his fumbling pursuit of freedom through subversion, humour, and misfit tenderness. The conversation touches on linguistic displacement, the emotional poverty of modern holidays, and the strange intimacy of customer service. It's a wry, bold, and compassionate dive into modern alienation—with lipstick, sharks, and sex in the supply closet.Buy Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/boo

In this textured conversation, author Eimear McBride joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company to discuss her latest novel The City Changes Its Face. Set in Camden Town in the 1990s, the book revisits characters from The Lesser Bohemians as they navigate the complexities of love, art, aging, trauma, and parenthood. McBride explores the enduring impact of childhood abuse, the fraught territory of families, and the search for creative meaning as her protagonists transition from actors to writers and filmmakers. She also reflects on the changing face of London, her writing process, and how voice, rhythm, and instinct drive her work. With warmth, candour, and a touch of wry humour, McBride shares insights into the emotional and formal risks of fiction, the influence of modernism, and why survival—not just suffering—deserves narrative space.Buy The City Changes Its Face: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-city-changes-its-faceEimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-fo