Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses by James Joyce

Recorded for Bloomsday 2026. If you're in Paris and it's still June 16th, join us between 2pm and 5pm at Shakespeare and Company, 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, Paris. Find the film here :   https://vimeo.com/408613317 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7xAM_eXuuk Adam Biles and Lex Paulson reunite after an eighteen-month hiatus for a live commentary on the 1967 Joseph Strick film adaptation of Ulysses...

For the second part of this year’s Bloomcast Holiday Special, Alice, Lex, and Adam get help from Claire-Louise Bennett and Foad Dizadji-Bahmani to explore how it challenges conventional ideas of narrative, language, and meaning. As always, our Bloomcasters invite listeners into a spirited and thought-provoking conversation that bridges literary analysis, philosophical inquiry, and personal reflect...

Happy Joycension Day! For this year’s Bloomcast Holiday Special, Alice, Lex, and Adam reunited for a lively discussion of Watt by Samuel Beckett, asking: How does Beckett’s minimalist, disintegrative style compare to James Joyce’s expansive, celebratory storytelling? What makes this novel so uniquely absurd and profound? And why does Watt feel both so playful and deeply unsettling? Is Watt a...

In this special episode, the Bloomcasters take on their trickiest task yet : criticizing one of their own.  Adam Biles’ “Beasts of England”, a canny and hilarious sequel to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, has received rave reviews and is already heading into translation in France and India -- but is it really any good? Bloomcasters Alice and Lex take the reins, pushing Adam into the darkest 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 wor...

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...

This December—six months after saying goodbye—Bloomcast is back for a Holiday Special! Join Alice, Lex and Adam as they answer your questions, play games, tease each other, drink (tea, whiskey, Gimber) and leap off Forty Foot and into Ulysses one more (one last?) time… * Bloomcast is a ten-part plunge into James Joyce's Ulysses presented by Adam Biles, Alice McCrum, and Lex Paulson, live from Shak...

Welcome to Bloomcast, a ten-part plunge into James Joyce's Ulysses presented by Adam Biles, Alice McCrum, and Lex Paulson, live from Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. Join them as they muddle through this radical, sublime, and often misunderstood novel first published one hundred years ago, in 1922.    In this (almost) final episode, recorded live on Bloomsday at the American Li...

What did James Joyce’s Ulysses do to literature, and how has literature reacted since? What is its role in the contemporary literary landscape? In celebration of the book’s centennial and in anticipation of Bloomsday, novelist and scholar Colm Tóibín spoke to Alice McCrum on May 27, 2022 at the American Library in Paris with a live audience both in person and on Zoom about the history, publication...

Pages 927 - 933 │ Penelope, part XIII │ Read by Sally Rooney Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of  Conversations with Friends ,  Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You . Buy Beautiful World, Where Are You: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780571365432/beautiful-world-where-are-you * Looking for our author interview podcast? Listen here: https://podfollow....

Pages 921 - 927 │ Penelope, part XII │ Read by Lou Doillon Lou Doillon, born in 1982, is a Franco-British singer, songwriter, artist, actor, model living in Paris, France. She is knight of arts and letters in France. Doillon has released 3 English speaking albums, a book of drawings, illustrated Patti Smith’s just kids collector Edition , featured in dozens of independent movies, toured...

Recorded at Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye,  Tuesday 31 May 2022 “Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” Sylvia Beach wrote to James Joyce when she made the decision to publish his novel, written over seven years and describing the events of a single day in Dublin. To celebrate a hundred years of this literary masterpiece, five devoted readers share their thoughts on reading a novel that h...

Pages 915 - 921 │ Penelope, part XI │ Read by Kae Tempest Kae Tempest is a poet, writer, a lyricist, a performer and a recording artist. They have published plays, poems, a novel, a book length non-fiction essay ( On Connection , published by Faber & Faber in 2020), released albums and toured extensively, selling out shows from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. They received Mercury Music Prize nom...

Pages 913 - 915 │ Penelope, part X │ Read by Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than 45 countries, is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 - 2021 will be published in March 2022.  Dearly , her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published No...

Pages 906 - 913 │ Penelope, part IX │ Read by Emilie Pine Emilie Pine is Professor of Modern Drama in the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin. She has published widely as an academic and critic, and is author of the international bestseller, Notes to Self: Essays. She published her first novel, Ruth & Pen, in May 2022.  Buy Ruth & Pen: https://shakespeareand...

In this special episode Alice, Lex and Adam geek out with the man who—Joyce aside—has probably been cited more than any other in our podcast: Professor Declan Kiberd. Professor Kiberd is the author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, as well as the introduction to the Penguin Classics official partner edition. Buy Ulysses and Us: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571242559/ulysses...

Pages 900 - 906 │ Penelope, part VIII │ Read by Bonnie Greer Bonnie Greer was born in Chicago’s west side. Although she initially pursued a career in law, she soon changed direction and began studying theatre, under the supervision of David Mamet, Elia Kazan and Steve Carter. In addition to award-winning stage, radio and screen plays, Bonnie Greer has written a number of novels and books, some of...

Pages 896 - 900 │ Penelope, part VII │ Read by Sylvia Whitman Sylvia Whitman runs Shakespeare and Company, Paris with her partner David Delannet. * Looking for our author interview podcast? Listen here: https://podfollow.com/shakespeare-and-company SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR EARLY EPISODES AND BONUS FEATURES All episodes of our Ulysses podcast are free and available to everyone. However, if you want to be...

Pages 892 - 896 │ Penelope, part VI │ Read by Susan Philipz Susan Philipsz (1965) is an internationally recognized artist who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her work deals with the spatial properties of sound and with the relationships between sound and architecture. She is particularly interested in the emotive and psychological properties of sound and how it can be used as a device to alter individua...

Pages 889 - 892 │ Penelope, part V │ Read by Joanna Lumley Joanna Lumley was born in Kashmir in 1946 and came to England as a young girl to complete her schooling at St Mary’s School in Sussex. She spent three years as a photographic model after being a house model for the late Jean Muir. She is probably best known for her portrayals on television of Purdey in The Avengers and Patsy in Absolutely...

Pages 884 - 889 │ Penelope, part IV │ Read by Meena Kandasamy Meena Kandasamy (b. 1984) is a poet, novelist and translator. Her writing aims to deconstruct trauma/violence, focussing on resistance movements for caste annihilation, feminism and self-determination. She explores this in her poetry and prose, most notably in her books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010) as well as h...

Pages 880 - 884│ Penelope, part III │ Read by Deborah Levy Deborah Levy is the author of seven novels, including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home and Hot Milk , and three volumes of memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. Both Swimming Home and Hot Milk were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her short story col...

Pages 876 - 880│ Penelope, part II │ Read by Caitlin O’Keefe Caitlin O’Keefe is a PhD candidate at the Institute of French Studies at New York University, where she is writing her dissertation on Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company and the making of interwar Paris. Her writing about the shop’s history has previously appeared in the New York Review of Books.   While working on...

Pages 871 - 876 │ Penelope, part I│ Read by Lucy Sante Author of Low Life, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, and Maybe the People Would Be the Times. Transitioned genders early in 2021. Buy The Other Paris here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780374536459/the-other-paris Follow on Instagram: www.instagram.com/luxante * Looking for our author interview podcast? Li...

Pages 852 - 871 │ Ithaca part VI│ Read by Rob Doyle & Roisin Kiberd Rob Doyle is the author of four internationally acclaimed books: Autobibliography, Threshold, This is the Ritual, and Here Are The Young Men, which was adapted as a film starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Dean-Charles Chapman, and was named as one of Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle's writing has appe...