The Shakespeare and Company Interview

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...

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 previousl...

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, a...

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...

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/lobster Buy Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends here: h...

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 o...

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...

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 bes...

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...

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 Got...

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...

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 Ben...

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 dis...

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'...

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...

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 fr...

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 hynopgog...

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 a...

Buy Emerald Wounds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/emerald-wounds Joyce 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 othe...

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...

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...

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...

Buy Up Late: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/up-late Reeling 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 o...

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 Briti...

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-school Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He...