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The Shakespeare and Company Interview

398 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 44 ratings

Discover your next favourite book, or take a deep dive into the mind of an author you love, with The Shakespeare and Company Interview podcast.


Long-form interviews with internationally acclaimed authors, recorded from our bookshop in the heart of Paris. Hosted by S&Co Literary Director, Adam Biles.


Discover all our upcoming events here.


If you enjoy these conversations, you can order The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews here.


Past guests include: Ottessa Moshfegh, Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, Har Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Katie Kitamura, Elif Shafak, Claire-Louiose Bennett, Leïla Simoni, Ian Dunt, David Runciman, Richard Powers, Eimear McBride, Armando Iannucci, Lauren Grodd, Lauren Elkin, Recebcca Solnit, John Berger, Hollie McNish, Michael Pedersen, Rob Doyle, Philippe Sands, George Saunders, Edouard Louis, Rachel Cusk, Preti Taneja, Alejandro Zambra, DBC Pierre, Meg Mason, Sandra Newman, David Simon, Joshua Cohen, Geoff Dyer, David Wallce-Wells, Emul Saint-John Mandel, Mohsin Hamid, Tess Gunty, A.M. Homes, John Higgs, Miriam Toews, Kamila Shamsie, Annie Ernaux, William Boyd, David Keenan, Jonathan Coe, Coco Mellors, Tom Mustill, Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Churchwell, Katy Hessel, Don Paterson, Elizabeth McCracken, Meena Kandasamy, Aleksandar Hemon, Catherine Lacey, Xiaolu Guo, M. John Harrison, Dolly Adderton, Hernan Diaz, Kathryn Scanlan, Ben Lerner, Isabel Waidner, Nick Laird, Adam Thirlwell, Mark O'Connell, Marie Darrieussecq, Jo Ann Beard, C Pam Zhang, Naomi Klein...and many, many more.



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Episodes

Love in the Time of Creative-Writing Classes, with Brandon Taylor

February 14, 2024 23:37 - 51 minutes - 258 MB

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 of the so-called “real” world beyond. The novel lives in Taylor’s delicate and perceptive handlin...

Annabelle Hirsch, A History of Women in 101 Objects

January 31, 2024 23:50 - 52 minutes - 72.1 MB

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 of history itself: how and why it’s told, who gets to tell it, and what gets cast into the shado...

☕Proust Questionnaire: Holly McNish & Michael Pedersen☕

January 17, 2024 23:05 - 1 hour - 115 MB

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 bestselling author of Slug (and other things I’ve been told to hate) and won the Ted Hughes award for...

BLOOMCAST | HOLIDAY SPECIAL | THE DEAD

January 05, 2024 23:00 - 1 hour - 138 MB

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 words, and much more. Carrying forth a Bloomcast tradition, they also play a festive game, populating c...

😱On Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed, with Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Adam Thirlwell😱

January 03, 2024 23:54 - 1 hour - 89.9 MB

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 Gothic novel should. It has been published by Fitzcarraldo in a lively and highly-readable transla...

👭🏼Naomi Klein on Doppelgangers, Conspiracy Theories, and the Shadowlands we all inhabit…👭🏼

December 20, 2023 23:48 - 1 hour - 89.5 MB

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 the “Mirror World”—that place populated with rightwing agitators, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers,...

Claire-Louise Bennett on Nightflowers, her immersive installation at Museum of Literature Ireland

December 06, 2023 23:48 - 56 minutes - 77.3 MB

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 Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, b...

🥘On Eating through the Endtimes, with C Pam Zhang🥘

November 22, 2023 23:44 - 45 minutes - 62 MB

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 discovers is much more ambitious, and potentially much more sinister. Buy Land of Milk and Honey: ...

🐕On Life, Art and the Line Between the Two, with Jo Ann Beard🐕

November 08, 2023 23:44 - 45 minutes - 63.1 MB

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' Anne Enright, Guardian 'The stories are essays, the essays are stories. Even when they are not lite...

👁️Sandra Newman on Julia, her re-imagining of George Orwell’s 1984 👁️

October 25, 2023 22:43 - 57 minutes - 79.1 MB

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 soul into her. And in doing so, not only does she allow readers to revisit 1984 with new eyes bu...

⛵Bidding adieu to a literary journal, with John Freeman (Feat. readings from Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Rebecca Makkai, and Mieko Kawakami read by translator Hitomi Yoshio)⛵

October 11, 2023 22:01 - 1 hour - 93.7 MB

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 from Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Rebecca Makkai, and Mieko Kawakami read by translator Hito...

🛏️On Not Sleeping, with Marie Darrieussecq🛏️

September 28, 2023 11:01 - 40 minutes - 55.7 MB

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 hynopgogic, at others dazzlingly alert and perceptive—while those that investigate the potential cures a...

🐖On Populism, Post-Truth, and Piggybacking George Orwell. Adam Biles in conversation with Rob Doyle.🐖

September 14, 2023 07:25 - 1 hour - 92.9 MB

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 are invited (for a small fee) to come and stroke, fondle, and take rides on the farm’s inhabitants...

💎Sunday Poetry: Emilie Moorhouse reads from Emerald Wounds, her new translation of the poems of Joyce Mansour💎

September 09, 2023 22:38 - 15 minutes - 21.1 MB

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 other poets from the movement’s heyday. Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour is a compa...

🧠On Making Sense of a Murderer, with Mark O’Connell🧠

August 30, 2023 22:01 - 57 minutes - 78.5 MB

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’Connell for decades and which leads him to meeting and getting to know the now elderly, long-fr...

🗞️On Power, Pamphlets, Parties and Possible Worlds, with Adam Thirlwell🗞️

August 16, 2023 22:36 - 55 minutes - 76.7 MB

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 and how we’re shaped by it—about friendship, about power, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, given th...

🪄On the KLF, Conspiracies, and Chaos with John Higgs🪄

August 02, 2023 22:37 - 53 minutes - 72.9 MB

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 obliged to veer off piste — into the worlds of punk, rave, Dada, magic, Discordianism, alchemy,...

Sunday Poetry: Nick Laird reads from Up Late

July 22, 2023 22:42 - 19 minutes - 26.3 MB

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 of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, ...

On Writing, Wormholes, and Wasted Opportunities, with Isabel Waidner

July 19, 2023 22:37 - 50 minutes - 68.8 MB

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 British class system? Is it one person’s singular quest to come to terms with themself? Is it a hilarious ...

🏫On writing and translating The Topeka School, with Ben Lerner and Jakuta Alikavazovic🏫

July 13, 2023 11:34 - 1 hour - 129 MB

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 has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is th...

🏇On Blood, Sweat and Racetracking, with Kathryn Scanlan🏇

June 27, 2023 14:23 - 28 minutes - 39.3 MB

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 itinerant world of trainers, grooms, jockeys, owners, gamblers, racing secretaries, vets, and, of course...

BONUS: Lex Paulson on Cicero and the Future of Democracy

June 15, 2023 22:01 - 1 hour - 83.2 MB

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 great thinker, and this talk is both an exquisite example of his work, and an insight into some...

Hernan Diaz on his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, Trust

June 13, 2023 08:56 - 1 hour - 82.9 MB

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 reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man’s story - of greed, love and ...

Proust Questionnaire: Dolly Alderton!

June 07, 2023 14:08 - 39 minutes - 54.5 MB

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://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7955486/the-shakespeare-and-company-book-of-interviews...

Leïla Slimani on Inheritance, Hippies and the Literature of Disappointment

June 01, 2023 15:01 - 49 minutes - 67.7 MB

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 position of a man of power to have extramarital affairs across the city. But these are turbulent...

BONUS: Martin Amis in conversation with Will Self (2010)

May 22, 2023 22:00 - 40 minutes - 55.3 MB

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! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Anti-Memoir, the Weird, and New Kinds of Disaster, with M. John Harrison

May 22, 2023 12:41 - 55 minutes - 76.6 MB

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 may best be described—if the book may best be described—the fact that it appeals to writers as d...

On Unclassifiable Books and Uncategorisable Lives, with Xiaolu Guo

May 04, 2023 16:09 - 38 minutes - 52.5 MB

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 concerns is “love”, it’s different forms, how it arrives, what it does to us, and how it fares under i...

How Westminster Works . . . and Why it Doesn’t, with Ian Dunt

April 17, 2023 09:53 - 1 hour - 84.6 MB

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 feeling more knowledgable—as you would hope—but also angrier and more energised, more equipped to engage...

✖️On Art, Alternative Histories, and the Arbitrariness of Life with Catherine Lacey✖️

April 05, 2023 22:24 - 59 minutes - 81.2 MB

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 — can ever really pin down “who” anybody is at all. Buy Biography of X here: https://www.shake...

📚How to Resist Amazon and Why, with Danny Caine📚

March 22, 2023 23:05 - 50 minutes - 69 MB

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 Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, ​Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the book How t...

On Old Wounds, Finding Peace, and Returning Home, with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

March 08, 2023 23:51 - 43 minutes - 59.5 MB

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 Your Children, Scattered is how Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse is able to tell the story on a very huma...

🗺️On Sarajevo, Multiple Worlds and History at the Fringes, with Aleksandar Hemon🗺️

February 22, 2023 23:22 - 1 hour - 321 MB

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 heart, though—not exactly beneath the grand sweep, but entwined with it—is a love story between two...

❤️‍🔥Valentine’s Special: Meena Kandasamy on The Book of Desire❤️‍🔥

February 08, 2023 23:26 - 48 minutes - 66.2 MB

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 sensual. Meena Kandasamy’s The Book of Desire is a genuine marvel. Buy The Book of Desire: http...

On Parents, Grief and the difference between Fiction and Memoir, with Elizabeth McCracken

January 25, 2023 23:42 - 51 minutes - 70.2 MB

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 by the narrator…although what exactly the difference is between each of the two forms, and how e...

🎸Music, Sugar and other Obsessions, with Don Paterson🎸

January 11, 2023 23:34 - 58 minutes - 80.3 MB

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 poetry, although perhaps in a more oblique way than the reader might be expecting. TOY FIGHTS is ...

📚Books of the Year📚

December 28, 2022 23:00 - 27 minutes - 37.7 MB

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 autobiography, to a novel about a 19th century translator’s revolt, to a classic of modern science fiction that s...

👩‍🎨Katy Hessel on The Story of Art Without Men👩‍🎨

December 21, 2022 23:42 - 1 hour - 85.8 MB

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, and how—time and again—despite the restrictions imposed by the constraints of the patriarchy hav...

📘BLOOMCAST | HOLIDAY SPECIAL📘

December 15, 2022 23:00 - 1 hour - 111 MB

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 Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. Join them as they muddle through this radical, sublime,...

🔥Sarah Churchwell on Gone with the Wind, January 6th, and the Lies America Tells🔥

December 07, 2022 23:59 - 1 hour - 91.1 MB

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 powerful critique of the book and film, and an excoriating analysis of how it has shaped the w...

🔔Hunchback of Notre-Dame Special! 🔔

December 02, 2022 13:34 - 59 minutes - 81.1 MB

🔔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 about our Hunchback of Notre-Dame Bundle here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7931829/the-hu...

🐋How to Speak to Whales (and other animals…) with Tom Mustill🐋

November 24, 2022 12:04 - 1 hour - 98.8 MB

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 create a “Google Translate for animals”. It’s also one man’s quest to make sense of the particular, trans...

💋On Love, Loss and Life in New York, with Coco Mellors💋

November 16, 2022 23:09 - 55 minutes - 75.7 MB

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 lives, but also sends disruptive aftershocks out into the lives of their friends and families. Al...

On Writing the Queer, Indigenous Experience with Billy-Ray Belcourt

November 09, 2022 23:11 - 53 minutes - 73.6 MB

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 marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneli...

🍫Jonathan Coe on Bournville🍫

November 02, 2022 23:15 - 1 hour - 85.3 MB

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 and the death of Princess Diana, we live not only alongside Mary, but also her parents, her husba...

🍄Psychedelic Storytelling, DIY Magick, and the New Masculinity, with David Keenan🍄

October 26, 2022 22:19 - 53 minutes - 73.1 MB

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 about David Keenan’s books. Through this portrait of a band, we get to know a town, its inhabitants,...

🥊 Miriam Toews on Sweary Matriarchs, the Absurdity of Life, and the Human Imperative to Experience Joy🥊

October 20, 2022 07:00 - 53 minutes - 73.4 MB

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 but love-and-life-filled world of this family. A world in which the only way through is to fight....

🎤 Sunday Poetry: Mark Polizzotti reads his new translations of Arthur Rimbaud🎤

October 15, 2022 22:11 - 15 minutes - 21.9 MB

**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, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever ...

🎤 Sunday Poetry: Mark Polizzotti reads his new translations of Arthur Rimbaud🎤

October 15, 2022 22:11 - 15 minutes - 21.9 MB

**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, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever ...

🎈William Boyd, The Romantic🎈

October 12, 2022 22:04 - 57 minutes - 78.4 MB

**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 travels the world, embarks on adventures, and falls in love, all across the nineteenth century....

Guests

Ian Dunt
1 Episode
Naomi Klein
1 Episode
Rutger Bregman
1 Episode
Sarah Churchwell
1 Episode

Books

The Art of Being
1 Episode

Twitter Mentions

@iandunt 1 Episode
@philippesands 1 Episode
@helenhet20 1 Episode