The Shakespeare and Company Interview

David Keenan's Industry of Magic and Light transports readers to the Scottish town of Airdrie in the 1960s and 70s, through a catalogue of relics from the local counterculture scene — or as the small ad describes it “Bunch of Local Hippy S**t for Sale. Job lot”. Expressed narrowly, the novel tells the story of the purveyors of a revolutionary psychadelic light show. But there’s nothing narrow abou...

Fight Night by Miriam Toews is a love letter to mothers and daughters, and grandmothers and granddaughters. Told from the perspective of nine-year-old Swiv, who’s having to deal with the imminent upheavals of the birth of a sibling and the declining health of her beloved grandma. With Swiv’s opening words — “Dear Dad, How are you? I was expelled.” — readers are drawn into the chaotic, ramshackle b...

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading ** A series of short readings from some of our favourite poets. Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbau...

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading ** No writer does the life-spanning novel in such a devilishly entertaining yet thought-provoking way as this week’s guest, William Boyd. His new book, The Romantic, follows the meandering, fortune-making-and-fortune-losing story of Cashel Greville Ross who...

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading ** In October 2018 we were honoured to welcome Annie Ernaux to Shakespeare and Company. In conversation with Adam Biles (and interpreter Alice Heathwood), she discussed her masterpiece The Years. To celebrate Annie Ernaux being chosen as the winner of the 20...

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading ** The protagonist of My Name is Yip is, in his own written words, “a mute”, he also stands at 4 feet 8 inches tall and again in his words, “there is not a single hair on my person.” These physical limitations, coupled with the fact that Yip lives in the sta...

**Find out more about our Year of Reading here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7486597/shakespeare-and-company-year-of-reading ** Kamila Shamsie’s new novel Best of Friends begins in Karachi in 1988, a year that would prove pivotal in the political history of Pakistan. Zahra and Maryam are teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood, finding their feet in a world where they have to keep one...

**Contains outrageous spoilers about the recent Bond film No Time to Die** There are few cultural phenomena that rival the impact, reach and longevity of either The Beatles or James Bond. That both made their first significant impact on the public consciousness on the same day 5 October 1962 — with the release of the Beatles’ first record “Love Me Do’ and Dr. No the first James Bond film — was a s...

A new series of short readings from some of our favourite poets. Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. Buy Poūka...

Lessons, Ian McEwan’s new novel, works from an intimate perspective, but on an epic scale. We accompany Roland Baines at different moments of his life—military brat, baby boomer, failed poet, pubescent boarder, single father, lounge pianist for hire—as he lives and relives some of the experiences—both domestic and world-historical—that moulded him. But as the years go by, and Roland’s sense of exa...

This week’s guest is A.M. Homes whose new novel The Unfolding invites readers into the lives of a wealthy, John-McCain supporting Republican family on the day of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, which turns into a satirical “origin story” for the MAGA movement, as well a book about families, the frustrations they fester, and the lies and compromises that sustain them. Buy The Unfolding here: https...

This week's guest is Tess Gunty, winner of the 2022 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for her novel The Rabbit Hutch. * The Rabbit Hutch is a low-cost housing complex in the post-industrial town of Vacca Vale, Indiana. It’s home to a mix of generations and familial constellations—couples, singletons, roommates—whose lives ebb and flow according to the economic and social forces that surround them, a...

This week’s guest is Stephen May whose fifth novel, Sell Us the Rope is a fictional retelling of events surrounding the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party, which took place in London in 1907. We spend most of our time following Koba—as the young man who would become Stalin was then known—as he arrives in a poverty-riddled city, and plunges into the heart of turn-of-the-cent...

This week we welcome Booker-longlisted Selby Wynn Schwartz, whose debut novel After Sappho is a fountain of fleeting fragments that together depict in lush psychical detail the lives of a group of lesbian women in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe. Except Selby Wynn Schwartz does not just tell the story of these women, or even retell it, but—inspired by the splintered remains of Sappho’s poetry—rein...

The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid’s startling new novel, holds up a shattered mirror to readers, reflecting back a recognisable, but heightened and reconfigured version of our world. One morning Anders, a white man, wakes up to find that his skin is now dark — with no indication as to how this has happened, or why now, why to him. Anders must reckon with this metamorphosis, how it changes the way h...

Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is a book of large scope—spanning more than four centuries—and even larger ideas. In fewer than 300 pages we take in pandemics, time travel and colonialism—of both lunar and early-20th Century varieties. What keeps our feet on solid ground is Emily St John Mandel’s elegant, light-touch prose, her almost preternatural gift for spinning a story, and perhaps...

This week we welcome former S&Co bookseller, Elaine Hsieh Chou, to discuss Disorientation, a campus novel retooled for the 21st century. Disorientation rushes headlong into some of the most fractious debates that are animating college campuses across the world: systemic injustice in academia, freedom of expression, and safe spaces, not forgetting the specific obstacles and prejudices faced by...

This week we’re joined by former diplomat Arthur Snell to discuss How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2021, his compelling and convincing account of the outsized role Britain has played in provoking or exacerbating many of the international crises of the past few decades. * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODES Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Com...

There are few people who can write so brilliantly, about so many subjects, all at once, as Geoff Dyer. The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings could be his most wide ranging to date. It’s about tennis—as the title suggests—and specifically about the curtain dropping on the career of one of the most successful, and most technically beautiful players, ever. But it’s also about endings of s...

This week’s guest is Michael Pedersen, whose new book Boy Friends is a profoundly personal, searingly honest examination of grief, inspired by the death of Scott Hutchison, the author’s dearest friend, and artistic co-conspirator Although heartbreaking at moments, Boy Friends is by no means a depressing book. In fact it’s funny, and tender, and insightful, as well as an authentic and touching ques...

We were joined in store this week by the wonderful Ali Smith to discuss Companion Piece, the the fifth-volume in the increasingly inaccurately named Seasons Quartet. Taking the ongoing pandemic as its backdrop, Companion Piece is a mischievous, enigmatic puzzle of a novel, that examines how companionship and togetherness might be possible in a world in which everything—from a deadly virus to the v...

Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh’s extraordinary fourth novel, unfolds in a medieval fiefdom of the same name. It’s a story of struggle in a world in which one human wields absolute power over another, but in which all must submit to a Nature that writhes and wriggles, and has still not been fully stripped of its capacity for magic. It’s also a world in which God and the Devil have a very real impact upo...

A collection of seven extraordinary short stories, Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood resists interpretation and elides description, shifting between voices and styles with astonishing deftness and grace. Spaces and territories are important to the book, how we inhabit them and how they shape us, as are attempts to understand how not just our minds, but our entire beings are affected when we p...

In this special live episode, recorded at the Hay Festival, we were joined by Sandra Newman, whose new novel The Men takes a very stark idea and runs with it. What would happen, to the world, to society, to minds, if one day all the Men, and boys—everyone with a Y chromosome in fact—just disappeared? Newman’s vision is of a world set free, but also a world plunged into mourning, in which some stru...

This week, we’re joined by Olivia Laing, one of the finest non-fiction writers at work today, to discuss her latest book Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Buy Everybody here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781509857128/everybody * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODES Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses If you want to spend even more tim...