The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Welcome to the Shakespeare and Company podcast. Every week or so we release a new conversation with an internationally acclaimed author, recorded at our store in the heart of Paris. Recent guests have included Elif Shafak, Richard Powers, Leïla Slimani, Lauren Groff, Armando Iannucci and many more. And for those of you who want to spend even more time here at Kilometre Zero, you can now subscribe...

This week Aysegül Savaş joined Adam live in our writer’s studio to discuss White on White , her book about art and artists, parents and their children, beauty and class, as well as the quest for perfection and the compromises we make in pursuit of it. White on White was called "marvelous" by Lauren Groff and "gentle, mysterious and profound” by Marina Abramović. Buy White on White here: https://sh...

This week Philip Hoare discusses Albert & the Whale his dive into the mind of Albrecht Durer, one of the most well-known yet mysterious of artists. Mysterious because he lived at that fluid time, in the fifteenth century, where history and legend often blend into one. Mysterious because his works feel so replete with meaning and yet prove so hard to interpret. And mysterious because his skills...

This week Adam is joined by Lauren Groff, whose latest novel Matrix an extraordinary story of transformation, visions, leaps of faith, vicious battles, friendship, and creativity, as well as — to cite USA Today — “a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell”. Matrix is a true original, unlike any literary experience you will have this year, probably one of the many reasons for which...

This week Adam is joined by poets Richard Barnett and Luke Kennard. Richard Barnet’s WHEREVER WE ARE WHEN WE COME TO THE END is an imagining of the experience of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein in the First World War, recounted in the same austere and succinct statements as the philosopher’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, the initial notes for which were taken during the conflict. The result is an...

Buckle up! This week we welcome Katharina Volckmer discussing her wild, taboo-busting debut novel The Appointment, a transgressive, spiky, astonishingly light-footed, and very, very funny monologue about sex, nationhood, shame . . . and often all three combined. Buy The Appointment here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781913097325/the-appointmentBrowse our online store here: https://shakespe...

This week Adam Biles is joined by comedy-legend Armando Iannucci to discuss Pandemonium, his riotously funny, but also deeply affecting mock-epic about the mistakes made and palms-greased during the British government’s handling of the pandemic. Buy Pandemonium here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781408715086/pandemonium-some-verses-on-the-current-predicamentBrowse our online store here: ht...

This week our guest is the brilliant Eimear McBride, discussing her first book of non-fiction Something Out of Place. Beginning with the sentiment of disgust with which, McBride argues, society regards and treats women, it develops into a blistering and astute polemic against the patriarchal framework that oppresses, coerces, sculpts controls and all too often ends the lives of half the world’s po...

Our guest this week is Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, discussing Bewilderment, his moving and visionary, Booker-shortlisted novel about a bereaved father and his neurodiverse son, their hunt for life on planets—both real and imaginary—and their attempts to convince others that life on our own planet is worth saving. Buy Bewilderment here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781785152634/be...

This special podcast is a collaboration with our friends at Archipelago books, showcasing three of their wonderful poetry titles: Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated by Nandana Dev Sen; Allegri by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Geoffrey Brock; And Until the Lions by Karthika Naïr. Buy Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated by Nandana Dev Sen here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781...

This week Adam Biles is joined by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and the presenter of the hugely popular Talking Politics podcast. David's new book Confronting Leviathan is a compelling and accessible introduction to some of the most important and radical thinkers (Wolstonecraft, Constant, De Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Hayek, MacKinnon, Fukuyama and more…) whose i...

This week we’re joined Anuk Arudpragasm to discuss A Passage North, his Booker-shortlisted story of age and youth, loss and survival in Sri Lanka. Buy A Passage North here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783786947/a-passage-northBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/.friendsofshakespeareandcompany.c...

This week Ian Dunt joined Adam Biles to discuss How to Be a Liberal, his immensely readable history of, and rallying cry for, “the single most radical political programme in the history of humankind.”Buy How to Be a Liberal here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781912454457/how-to-be-a-liberal-the-story-of-freedom-and-the-fight-for-its-survivalBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeare...

This week we’re joined by the brilliant Leïla Slimani to discuss The Country of Others, her immensely readable, deeply moving, Steinbeckian family drama set against the grand sweep of Moroccan and French history. Buy The Country of Others here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571361625/the-country-of-othersBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/b...

This week, we welcome the twice Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy here to discuss The Making of Incarnation, a novel that asks some of the most pressing but also most confounding questions of our age. How much will we ever be able to understand the forces that drive the universe, and how much meaning should we ascribe to them? Will the drive for efficiency inevitably strip away our humanity?...

This week, we welcome one of the most innovative and fearless writers at work today, Claire-Louise Bennett, here to discuss CHECKOUT 19 a novel that explores class, freedom, adolescence, transcendence, sexual politics and artistic synthesis. Buy Checkout 19 here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781787333550/checkout-19Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-s...

Join us as we take a plunge into the wild mind of David Keenan and his latest novel, the hallucinatory masterpiece Monument Maker.“In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination” LENNY KAYEBuy Monument Maker here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474617093/monumen...

For our first podcast of la rentrée we were delighted to be joined by Elif Shafak, with us to discuss her mesmerising new novel The Island of Missing Trees, a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, memory and amnesia, human-induced destruction of nature, and, finally, renewal. Buy The Island of Missing Trees. here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241434994/the-islan...

As the S&Co podcast takes its summer break for a few weeks, we leave you with this fascinating and funny conversation between Pola Oloixarac and John Freeman, recorded on the bookshop terrace on 19th July. Many thanks to John, Pola and the NYU Creative Writing Program for making this very special evening possible.*Buy Pola Oloixarac’s books here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/search?q=Pola+Olo...

In the second episode from our first in-store event in 18 months, Katie Kitamura discusses her deeply affecting, Barack Obama-approved, fourth novel Intimacies with S&Co Literary Director, Adam Biles. Buy Intimacies here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781787332003/intimacies-a-barack-obama-summer-2021-reading-pickBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-stor...

For our first in-store event for more than eighteen months we were joined by two of our favourite novelists, Jakuta Alikavazovic and Katie Kitamura. In this first episode from that evening Jakuta Alikavazovic discusses her extraordinary, crepuscular novel Night As It Falls with S&Co Literary Director, Adam Biles. Buy Night As It Falls here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571342266/night-a...

This week we were joined by Laurent Binet, discussing Civilisations, his hugely entertaining counterfactual novel in which Atahualpa leads an army of two hundred Incas to Europe . . . Buy Civilisations here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781787302297/civilisationsBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https:/...

Today, Adam was joined by Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, a collective of self-taught internet sleuths who have solved some of the biggest crimes of our time, from the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over the Ukraine to the sourcing of weapons in the Syrian Civil War and the identification of the Salisbury poisoners. Buy We Are Bellingcat here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781526615732...

Joining Adam Biles this week is behavioural and data scientist Dr Pragya Agarwal discussing (M)otherhood her meticulously researched, searingly honest investigation into motherhood and fertility. Buy (M)otherhood here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781838853167/motherhoodBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here:...

This week we’re joined by Pulitzer-prizewinners Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan to discuss Francis Bacon: Revelations, their biography of one of the most radical, shocking and slippery artists of the 20th century. Buy Francis Bacon Revelations here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780007298419/francis-bacon-revelationsBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-sto...