The Shakespeare and Company Interview
403 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 44 ratingsDiscover 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
🍄Psychedelic Storytelling, DIY Magick, and the New Masculinity, with David Keenan🍄
October 26, 2022 22:19 - 53 minutes - 73.1 MBDavid 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 MBFight 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....
🏅BONUS: Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize in Literature🏅
October 07, 2022 11:20 - 1 hour - 90.6 MB**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 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature we are releasing the recording of that evening as a bonus podcast ...
🐴💰On Friendship and Redemption in the time of the Gold Rush, with Paddy Crewe💰🐴
October 05, 2022 22:15 - 45 minutes - 62.2 MB**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 state of Georgia during the early nineteenth century gold rush, might make you imagine that a brut...
👭🏽On Friendship, Politics and when the Two Collide, with Kamila Shamsie👭🏽
September 28, 2022 22:38 - 56 minutes - 76.9 MB**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 eye on the intrigues of the school yard and the other on the lives into which they are expecti...
🎸🤵♂️The Beatles, James Bond and the British Psyche ,with John Higgs🤵♂️🎸
September 21, 2022 22:34 - 1 hour - 84.4 MB**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 significant enough piece of synchronicity for John Higgs to begin an investigation into the deca...
🎤 Sunday Poetry: Tayi Tibble reads from Poūkahangatus🎤
September 17, 2022 22:38 - 6 minutes - 8.78 MBA 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 Poūkahangatus: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6037217/tibble-tayi-poukahangatus In...
🎹Ian McEwan on Lessons🎹
September 14, 2022 22:09 - 1 hour - 83.5 MBLessons, 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 exactly how he was shaped and by whom changes, we readers come to understand how much our own appre...
🇺🇸 A.M. Homes on Satire, the American Dream, and Reaching Across the Political Divide🇺🇸
September 07, 2022 22:59 - 53 minutes - 73.4 MBThis 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://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7284774/homes-a-m-y-the-unfolding * SUBSCRIBE NOW FO...
A.M. Homes on Satire, the American Dream, and Reaching Across the Political Divide
September 07, 2022 22:59 - 53 minutes - 73.4 MBThis 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://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7284774/homes-a-m-y-the-unfolding * SUBSCRIBE NOW FO...
🇺🇸 A.M. Homes on Satire, the American Dream, and Reaching Across the Political Divide🇺🇸
September 07, 2022 22:59 - 53 minutes - 73.4 MBThis 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://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7284774/homes-a-m-y-the-unfolding * SUBSCRIBE NOW FO...
🐇On Transcendence, Parental Failure & writing Indiana, with Tess Gunty🐇
August 31, 2022 22:55 - 47 minutes - 64.7 MBThis 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, as well as the deeper-flowing currents of their pasts. It’s also home to Blandine who, we lear...
☭🎩When Young Stalin came to London, with Stephen May🎩☭
August 24, 2022 22:54 - 47 minutes - 65.1 MBThis 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-century revolutionary politics. There’s factionalism, and arguments, and strategising, and backstab...
After Sappho, with Selby Wynn Schwartz
August 17, 2022 22:00 - 56 minutes - 78 MBThis 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—reinvents the very form of the novel, turning it into something more diffuse, more choric and more r...
👨🏼✨Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man✨👨🏾
August 10, 2022 22:52 - 52 minutes - 72 MBThe 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 he looks at himself, how others look at him, and how he looks at others looking at him… The Last...
⏳Time Travel, Autofiction & Never-ending Book Tours, with Emily St John Mandel⌛
August 03, 2022 22:53 - 45 minutes - 62.5 MBEmily 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 above all else the convincing, compassionately-told human stories at its core. * SUBSCRIBE NOW...
🎓😵💫Disorientation: A Wild Satire of 21st-Century Campus Life, with Elaine Hsieh Chou😵💫🎓
July 27, 2022 22:50 - 57 minutes - 79.3 MBThis 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 Asian Americans as they work to get a foothold on the academic ladder. * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS E...
🇬🇧🔨How Britain Broke the World, with Arthur Snell🔨🇬🇧
July 20, 2022 22:02 - 58 minutes - 79.9 MBThis 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 Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses If you want to spend even more time a...
🎾Geoff Dyer on Roger Federer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sensing an Ending…🎾
July 13, 2022 22:14 - 1 hour - 86.9 MBThere 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 so many other kinds: the significance, or otherwise, of an artist’s last work; mental and intelle...
👨❤️👨On Love, Grief and Male Friendship, with Michael Pedersen👨❤️👨
July 06, 2022 22:45 - 55 minutes - 76.3 MBThis 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 quest to give voice to the maelstrom of emotions such a devastating loss provokes. It’s also an exam...
🎙️🍃Ali Smith on Companion Piece (live in the bookshop!)🍃🎙️
June 29, 2022 22:50 - 52 minutes - 72.4 MBWe 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 vested interests of corrupt politicians—is fighting to divide us. * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EP...
🐑Ottessa Moshfegh on Power, Magic…and her Pirate Ancestors🐑
June 22, 2022 22:12 - 56 minutes - 77.3 MBLapvona, 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 upon Lapvonians’s lives, and in which the next village feels like another world, but heaven and hel...
🥀On Darkness, Fables and Heartbreak, with Vanessa Onwuemezi🥀
June 15, 2022 22:06 - 52 minutes - 72.8 MBA 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 pass from darkness into light, and back again. Buy Dark Neighbourhood: https://shakespeareandco...
A World Without Men, with Sandra Newman (Live at Hey Festival)
June 08, 2022 22:53 - 47 minutes - 64.8 MBIn 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 structures collapse while others hold firm, in which certain of those left behind cling on to the “r...
On Bodies, Freedom and Change, with Olivia Laing
May 25, 2022 22:25 - 1 hour - 87.2 MBThis 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 time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early ac...
Meg Mason on Sorrow and Bliss
May 18, 2022 22:16 - 59 minutes - 81.8 MBThis week’s guest is Meg Mason, author of the literary sensation Sorrow and Bliss. * 'It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud... Extraordinary' Guardian Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendles...
📱Love (and Life) in the time of Algorithms, with Jem Calder📱
May 11, 2022 22:39 - 52 minutes - 72 MBThis week’s guest is guest is Jem Calder, author of Reward System a series of interlinked stories that charts a group of friends in their mid-twenties as they struggle to make something of their lives in an indifferent, often hostile, 21st century metropolis. Sally Rooney said that “Reward System is an exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Reading these stories, I found myself thinking newly and differently about contemporary life” while Holly Pester called it...
🐍🎲Luck, Life and Little Snakes, with DBC Pierre🎲🐍
May 04, 2022 22:11 - 56 minutes - 78 MBDBC Pierre’s Big Snake Little Snake is a characteristically freewheeling, riotous account of a couple of years the author lived in the Caribbean, spending his time, among other endeavours, conducting an inquiry into risk. It’s also an extraordinarily fun book, yet with a deep seriousness at its core. Seeking to understand, as it does, how the world can be presented to us as fundamentally indifferent, while also being so clearly, and so often, unfair. Buy Big Snake, Little Snake here: https:...
On imagining what hasn’t, can’t and won’t imagine you, with Margo Jefferson
April 27, 2022 22:00 - 51 minutes - 70.3 MBDespite being a lauded writer and critic, despite being the winner of a Pulitzer Prize even, Margo Jefferson innovates and takes risks like a writer with nothing to lose. Her new book, Constructing a Nervous System is both the history of a mind’s formation and the deconstruction of a culture and its tropes, as well as what feels like a form of self-analysis taking place on the page, beneath the readers eyes, in real time. It’s a book about race and gender, but also of family and culture, whe...
On Prison, Literature and Grief with Preti Taneja
April 20, 2022 22:14 - 56 minutes - 77.9 MBOn 29 November 2019, Usman Kahn attacked and killed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at Fishmongers Hall in London, and was later shot dead by police on London Bridge. Jones and Merritt were involved in a prison education programme in which Kahn had participated. All three had gathered at an event that day to mark five years of the programme. Preti Taneja also worked on that programme as a teacher of creative writing in prisons. Jack Merritt oversaw her work. Kahn was one of her students. After...
Superstar Poets and (Step)Fatherhood in Chile, with Alejandro Zambra
April 13, 2022 22:37 - 1 hour - 103 MBSuperstar Poets and (Step)Fatherhood in Chile, with Alejandro Zambra What is a Chilean Poet? According to Pru, one of the characters in Alejandro Zambra’s latest novel, ‘Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or a Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model.’ That’s to say they are famous, respected and wealthy…or at least, some of them are. But what makes a Chilean poet? That’s a little harder to pin down, and in a way it’s this question that bugs not only the writer of this ...
Rachel Cusk & Siemon Scamell-Katz on Writing, Painting and the Vanishing Sublime
April 06, 2022 22:30 - 1 hour - 116 MBIn this special double episode we welcome dear friends of the bookshop Rachel Cusk and Siemon Scamell-Katz. First up is a conversation between Rachel Cusk and Adam Biles about her extraordinary recent novel Second Place, recorded in March in front of a small in store audience. Then, the podcast decamps 28 rue Saint Gille, where Siemon Scamell-Katz’s transcendent exhibition La fin de l’alterité (The End of Otherness), runs until April the 16th. There, Adam talks with Siemon about his exhibiti...
📘🎸Special Episode: Music for Ulysses with Alex Freiman🎸📘
April 01, 2022 22:43 - 35 minutes - 48.9 MBIn this special episode, we’re joined by Parisian jazz musician Alex Freiman, to discuss the process of composing the theme music for Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses Hear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Follow Alex Freiman on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/ * Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? Listen here: https://podfollow.com/s...
George Saunders on Reading Better, Writing Better, and Living Better
March 30, 2022 22:52 - 52 minutes - 72.6 MBTo mark the paperback release of George Saunders’s extraordinary reading and writing guide A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, we are delighted to release this conversation from last year—previously only available to Friends of Shakespeare and Company. * 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 time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes ...
Memory, Guilt and the Hunt for a Nazi Fugitive with Philippe Sands
March 23, 2022 23:57 - 49 minutes - 68.1 MBOne way Philippe Sands has described his extraordinary new book The Ratline is as “a sort of Nazi love story”. While there is certainly a love-story between two Nazis at its heart—specifically the marriage of Otto and Charlotte Wachter—The Ratline is so much more than that. It’s an investigation into the escape routes used by high-ranking German officials after the end of the Second World War, that reads at times, like a spy-thriller. It’s a study of memory, responsibility and guilt. It’s an...
Global Disorder and the road to war in Ukraine, with Helen Thompson
March 16, 2022 23:40 - 1 hour - 90.9 MBAs its title suggests, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a book about the many and varied crises our world is facing. However by tracing the roots of these crises back over decades rather than years, and by focussing less on the political or economic shocks themselves, and more on the systemic and cross-continental fault lines that allowed for and amplified these shocks, Disorder, acts as a welcome antidote the short-termism and parochial thinking that has come to define a lot of p...
On the Pleasures (and Pains) of Rereading, with Rob Doyle
March 09, 2022 23:00 - 53 minutes - 73.8 MBWe speak with novelist Rob Doyle about his new book Autobibliography in which he recounts a year spent rereading 52 books. Detailing the memories the books unearthed and the impact they had on him Autobibliography is a fascinating insight into the apprenticeship of one of our most exciting young novelists and a full-throated, although not unambiguous celebration of the power of literature. Buy Autobibliography here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781800750524/autobibliography * SUBS...
Dostoyevsky, the Parisian murderer, and the creation of a masterpiece, with Kevin Birmingham
March 02, 2022 23:49 - 57 minutes - 78.9 MBIn The Sinner and the Saint, Kevin Birmingham deftly unpicks the personal, societal, historical and philosophical forces that led Fyodor Dostoyeksky—isolated, indebted, beset by epileptic seizures—to take up his pen in the summer of 1865 and begin writing Crime and Punishment, and shows how it’s impossible to understand the invention of Rasklonikov without also getting to grips with the mind of a French murderer-poet who charmed and outraged Parisian society, in almost equal measure, three d...
An insider’s history of Rock & Roll, with Lenny Kaye
February 23, 2022 23:05 - 1 hour - 93.5 MBThis week we’re joined by the legendary guitarist, composer, record producer, writer, and founding member of Patti Smith and Her Band, Lenny Kaye to discuss his epic and illuminating new book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock & Roll Buy Lighting Striking here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474615075/lightning-striking * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses If you w...
Lenny Kaye on Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock & Roll
February 23, 2022 23:05 - 1 hour - 93.5 MBThis week we’re joined by the legendary guitarist, composer, record producer, writer, and founding member of Patti Smith and Her Band, Lenny Kaye to discuss his epic and illuminating new book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock & Roll Buy Lighting Striking here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474615075/lightning-striking * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses If you w...
Poetry, class, and radical performance, with Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen
February 16, 2022 23:01 - 55 minutes - 75.6 MBBack in November, Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen dropped by the bookshop for a reading and a chat. The conversation touched on poetry, class, adapting the Greeks, artistic cross-pollination, the perks of being Scottish writer, and how midwives are the toughest crowd of all . . . Buy Slug here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780349726366/slug-the-sunday-times-bestseller Buy Oyster here: Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore ...
Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen
February 16, 2022 23:01 - 55 minutes - 75.6 MBBack in November, Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen dropped by the bookshop for a reading and a chat. The conversation touched on poetry, class, adapting the Greeks, artistic cross-pollination, the perks of being Scottish writer, and how midwives are the toughest crowd of all . . . Buy Slug here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780349726366/slug-the-sunday-times-bestseller Buy Oyster here: Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore ...
** Valentine's Special ** Love, Language and London with Xiaolu Guo
February 10, 2022 14:01 - 47 minutes - 64.8 MBFor the Valentine’s week episode of our podcast, we were joined by Xiaolu Guo to discuss her intense, fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, A Lover’s Discourse. Buy A Lover’s Discourse here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781529112481/a-lovers-discourse Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regul...
** Valentine's Special ** Xiaolu Guo on A Lover's Discourse
February 10, 2022 14:01 - 47 minutes - 64.8 MBFor the Valentine’s week episode of our podcast, we were joined by Xiaolu Guo to discuss her intense, fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, A Lover’s Discourse. Buy A Lover’s Discourse here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781529112481/a-lovers-discourse Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regul...
Comedy and the Culture Wars, with Andrew Hankinson
February 03, 2022 11:32 - 1 hour - 59.7 MBThis week’s guest is Andrew Hankinson, author of the brilliant Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.), a book about three things: 1. A room called the Comedy Cellar. 2. Who gets to speak in that room. 3. What they get to say. Buy Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781911617686/dont-applaud-either-laugh-or-dont-at-the-comedy-cellar Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/1...
Andrew Hankinson on Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.)
February 03, 2022 11:32 - 1 hour - 59.7 MBThis week’s guest is Andrew Hankinson, author of the brilliant Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.), a book about three things: 1. A room called the Comedy Cellar. 2. Who gets to speak in that room. 3. What they get to say. Buy Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781911617686/dont-applaud-either-laugh-or-dont-at-the-comedy-cellar Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/1...
Patrick Hastings, The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses
January 29, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 86.2 MBIn anticipation of the first episode of Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses this Wednesday, we were delighted to talk to former S&Co tumbleweed Patrick Hastings, and the creator of UlyssesGuide.com, about The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, his essential companion to this modernist classic.Buy The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781421443492/the-guide-to-james-joyces-ulysses*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR EARLY EPISODES AND BONUS FEATURESAll episodes o...