The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is the testament of Sonia—a horse trainer, a racetracker—who tells her story in taut vignettes, each of which contains more person, more world, more life, than a dozen pages of most contemporary novels. And what a world it is. Bruising, and brutal, where physical pain and severe injury are commonplace, a world shaped by violence and addiction, a tight-knit itineran...

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...

We recently spent a very special evening with 2023 Pulitzer Prizewinner Hernan Diaz, discussing TRUST, his extraordinary novel of power, greed and love. Buy Trust here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7809629/diaz-hernan-trust * A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to...

When Dolly Alderton stopped by for a signing we took the chance to get her to answer our Café’s Proust Questionnaire. Dolly is a self-confessed over-sharer, and this is a lot of fun! Buy Dolly Alderton's books here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/post/101/dolly-alderton-signing * If you enjoy these conversations, you can pre-order The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews here: https:/...

In Watch Us Dance —Leïla Slimani’s effervescent new novel—we rejoin the Belhaj family in 1968 a dozen years into the life on an independent Morocco. Amine and Mathilde have completed their journey from peasant farmers to paid-up members of the local bourgeoisie. Their daughter Aicha is in Strasbourg training to be a Doctor. They have just built a private swimming pool, and Amine is exploiting his...

After the recent passing of Martin Amis, we dug out this sizzling conversation between him and Will Self at our festival in 2010. All of Amis’s brilliance, wit and thoughtfulness is on show. Enjoy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wish I Was Here—the new book by today’s guest M. John Harrison—is a work which resists description. Monique Roffey goes for “a deep dive into the back-and-forth, up-down sideways mind of a true genius”, Helen Macdonald plumps for “an archaeology of fragments that shivers with wholeness” while Jonathan Coe turns interrogative, asking “Is it a memoir? Is it a handbook for writers?” However the book...

Like all of Xiaolu Guo’s work RADICAL is difficult to describe because it’s difficult to categorise. It might be called a memoir, but it’s form makes it unlike any memoir readers may have encountered before. It’s also a fascinating reflection on language, on literature, on memory, on vagrancy, on art, on nature and on what makes a home. But perhaps the central circle in this Venn diagram of concer...

In How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn’t Ian Dunt blows the cobwebs out of the arcane nooks and crannies of the British political system, demystifying it with his clear, compelling, and entertaining prose. He also shines a light upon how the system as it stands does not, in fact, work and, indeed, is often designed not to work. How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn’t leaves the reader fee...

Biography of X is one of the most intriguing, compelling and vertigo-inducing reads of recent years. Structured and referenced like a biography—written by one CM Lucca—the central contention of the book is Lucca’s quest to unearth the origins and influences of X, the celebrated artist known by a single letter. It also calls into question how much we — as biographers, as readers, as fans, as lovers...

This episode, Adam speaks to Danny Caine, owner of Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, and author of How to Resist Amazon and Why? an excoriating, enraging but ultimately empowering takedown of one of the world’s most powerful and damaging companies.  Buy How to Resist Amazon and Why?: https://www.ravenbookstore.com/book/9781648411236 * Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Con...

All Your Children, Scattered by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse is about the lives lived by those in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Those who hid from it, those who fought against it, those who fled it, and those who were born into it. Telling the story of a family through the eyes of three generations—Blanche, her mother Immaculata, and her son Stokely—one of the many remarkable things about All...

Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel, The World and All That it Holds starts with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, and then takes us from Bosnia, to Uzbekistan, to China and elsewhere, covering a convulsive period of history in which the technological advances, the political turbulence, and the displacement of people bear striking similarities to those of our own time. At it’s hea...

Our guest for this year’s Valentine’s Special is one of the most innovative, radical and compelling writers at work today Meena Kandasamy. This year Meena returns to poetry with The Book of Desire, a new translation of the third part of the Thirukural, the foundational poem of Tamil culture. With her new version, Kandasamy offers a feminist interventionist translation that feels fresh, lively and...

Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel The Hero of this Book is the profound and poignant account of one writer’s attempt to convey something of the irrepressible, indomitable, indefatigable, almost indescribable character of her recently deceased mother on the page. Although the narrator repeatedly stresses that this is a novel, and not a memoir, that’s to say neither a memoir by McCracken nor a memoir...

This week Adam is joined by Don Paterson, multi-award winning, and much beloved poet, and now author of one of the extraordinary and refreshing memoir, TOY FIGHTS: A BOYHOOD. Charting the first two decades of the poet’s life, from his birth in Dundee to his move to London, TOY FIGHTS is a book about many things: music, class, religion, origami, money, mental illness, and family. It’s also about po...

In this special episode of the Shakespeare and Company podcast, we look back at our bookseller’s favourite reads of the year. Some of these titles were published in 2022, others just happened to rise to the top of their respective “to read” piles in the past twelve months…but they all come with the S&Co. stamp of approval. There’s something for everyone here, from a rock star’s autobiogra...

Katy Hessel made her name highlighting the grotesque disparity between the representation of men and women in art galleries and fighting to correct it. Through her podcast and Instagram account, The Great Women artists, and now in her magisterial book The Story of Art Without Men. Beginning in the 16th century, Hessel demonstrates time and again how women have been erased from the history of art,...

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...

Gone with the Wind is one of the highest grossing films of all time, based on one of the bestselling novels ever written. It is also, according to Sarah Churchwell in her new book, a story “ about enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter. Which”—Churchwell adds “is pretty much the story of American history.” The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells provides a...

🔔 Hunchback of Notre-Dame Special! 🔔 To celebrate the launch of our exclusive S&Co edition of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame—as well as a limited-edition gift bundle featuring a signed print of the beautiful cover art—Adam is joined by Krista Halverson, S&Co Publishing Director, and artist Neil Gower, to discuss this extraordinary classic of French literature. Find out more ab...

How to Speak Whale is an investigation into the possibility, or otherwise, of human cetacean dialogue. It looks into the history of our relationship with these creatures—in some important ways so similar to us, in others, so profoundly different. It lays out our various attempts to interpret their song, and looks at how big data, combined with an open source philosophy might allow us to creat...

This week we were joined in the writer’s studio by Coco Mellors, author of one of our biggest selling novels of the year, Cleopatra and Frankenstein. It’s the story of a woman and a man—Cleo and Frank—who meet in New York on New Year’s Eve 2006, who fall in love despite—or perhaps because of—their very many differences, and whose marriage within months causes not only an earthquake in their own li...

This week we welcome celebrated poet Billy-Ray Belcourt to discuss his innovative and moving debut novel A Minor Chorus.  In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginaliz...

Bournville, Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, ostensibly follows the life of Mary Lamb (née Clarke) from VE Day 1945, when she was a precocious young pianist, to the darkest depths of the recent pandemic, stopping off at some of the events that helped define (and redefine) Britain over the last seven decades. As we hop from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, to the 1966 World Cup, through jubilees a...