The Shakespeare and Company Interview

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 the title: about time.Buy The Future Future: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-future-futureAdam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, numerology and the very fabric of reality itself. Republished now with added reflective footnotes The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds is as wild a ride as you would want from a book about the playful, chaotic, duo at the heart of the band. Not only that, but it might also reveal what Higgs calls “one of the most important philosophical leaps of the twentieth century”…Buy The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-klfJohn Higgs is the author I HAVE AMERICA SURROUNDED, THE KLF, STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE, WATLING STREET, THE FUTURE STARTS HERE, WILLIAM BLAKE NOW, WILLIAM BLAKE VS THE WORLD and LOVE AND LET DIE. He lives in Brighton with his wife and their two children. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Buy Up Late: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/up-lateReeling 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, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved. Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden. There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. But there is great tenderness, too, a fondness for what grows between the cracks, especially those glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, before the knowledge or accumulation of loss, where everything is still at stake and infinite, 'the darkness under the cattle grid'.Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic and former lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 and painfully on target parody of the literary world? Or Is it, even, a love story? Listen on the find out…Buy Corey Fah Does Social Mobility: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/corey-fah-does-social-mobilityIsabel Waidner is a writer based in London. They are the author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Sterling Karat Gold, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and Gaudy Bauble. They are the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2021 and were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022. They are a co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and they are an academic in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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-schoolBen Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her debut novel, Corps Volatils, won the Prix Goncourt in 2008 for Best First Novel. She has translated works by Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace and Anna Burns into French. She lives in Paris and writes a regular column for the daily newspaper Liberation.*Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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—at the centre of it all—those enormous, enigmatic, empathetic beasts . . . horses.A work of fiction, based on interviews with a real-life Sonia, Kick the Latch thrums with a kind of hyper-authenticity, cracking open a closed society, placing a marginal life at its centre, and provoking a profound resonance between Sonia’s very specific struggles and joys and our own.Buy Kick the Latch: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/kick-the-latchKathryn Scanlan is the author of The Dominant Animal and lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in NOON, Granta and Fence, and is forthcoming in The Paris Review. Her story ‘The Old Mill’ was selected by Michael Cunningham for the 2010 Iowa Review Fiction Prize. She has degrees in painting, writing, and English from the University of Iowa and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her debut novel, AUG 9—FOG, a literary adaptation of a found diary, was published by FSG in 2019.Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 of the ideas that shaped his particular and insightful approach to James Joyce’s masterwork.We were so pleased to have Lex with us that evening, and are delighted to be able to release this talk on Bloomsday. Enjoy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 betrayal - is about to slip from his grasp. Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.Hernan Diaz's first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of a book of essays, and his fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Whiting Award and the winner of the William Saroyan International Prize, he has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Trust is his second novel. *Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 (Books will ship in September, one month before the publication date. )*Dolly Alderton is a writer and broadcaster. She has written three Sunday Times best-selling books, Everything I Know About Love, a memoir, Ghosts, a novel and Dear Dolly, collected wisdom from her Sunday Times Style Column. She wrote and executive-produced the TV adaptation of Everything I Know About Love, shown on BBC One in the UK and Peacock in the US over summer 2022. She has also hosted the number one podcasts The High Low, Love Stories and Sentimental in the City. She has written a column for The Sunday Times Style since 2015 and is their resident Agony Aunt.*Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 times: students and workers, in cities all over the world, are in revolt, the consumer society is being born, and the Americans are preparing to put a man on the moon.And then there are the hippies, many of whom are washing up on the shores around in Essaouira hoping to expand their minds, and avoid the draft, during their stay in this Moroccan port.Watch Us Dance, throbs with life and colour, and Leila Slimani navigates between the macro and the micro with extraordinary authorial dexterity. It’s a novel that somehow sweeps readers up in the tides of history, while never shifting their attention from the minutiae of grievances, but also affections, that criss-cross every family.Buy Watch Us Dance: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7955500/watch-us-danceLeïla Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, which she won for Lullaby. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.