The Shakespeare and Company Interview

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 are captivating in their detail, description and weirdness. For those whose lives have never been blighted by insomnia, Sleepless will be a fascinating insight into this strangest and most psychologically traumatic of conditions, while those who have suffered it will find in these pages solidarity and solace.Buy Sleepless: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/sleepless-5Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and is recognized as one of the leading voices of contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has written more than twenty books. Text has published Tom Is Dead, All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby and Crossed Lines. In 2013 Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men. She has written art criticism and journalism for a number of publications, including Libération and Charlie Hebdo, and is also a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. She lives in Paris.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 areinvited (for a small fee) to come and stroke, fondle, and take rides on the farm’s inhabitants.But life is not a bed of roses for the animals, in spite of what their leaders may want them to believe. Elections are rigged, the community is beset by factions, and sacred mottos are being constantly updated. The Farm is descending into chaos. What’s more, a mysterious ‘illness’ has started ripping through the animals, killing them one by one…In Beasts of England, Adam Biles honours, updates and subverts George Orwell’s classic, all the while channelling the chaotic, fragmentary nature of populist politics in the Internet age into a savage farmyard satire.*Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, from where he hosts their weekly podcast. In 2022, he conceived and presented Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses—an epic, polyphonic celebration of James Joyce’s masterwork. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2016, and was chosen by The Guardian as a Fiction Pick for 2016 and was a book of the year for The Observer, The Irish Times, The Millions and 3:AM Magazine. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel, Beasts of England, will be published in September 2023 by Galley Beggar Press, and in 2025 by Editions Grasset. It was selected as a "2023 highlight" by The Guardian. A collection of his conversations with writers, The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews, will be published by Canongate in October 2023.Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’. Doyle has adapted it for film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle also has a published collection of short stories; This is the Ritual. Doyle is the editor of the anthology The Other Irish Tradition and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. His newest book Threshold will be published in 2020. He teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.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.

Buy Emerald Wounds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/emerald-woundsJoyce 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 compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology of this incendiary poet. With a biographical introduction by translator Emilie Moorhouse, who was drawn to Mansour’s tough, take-no-prisoners stance during the societal reckoning of the #MeToo movement, Emerald Wounds showcases the entire arc of her trajectory as a poet, from the at-once gothic and minimalist fragments of her first collection in 1953, Screams, to the serpentine power of her final poems of the 1980s. Juxtaposing the original French poems with their English translations, Mansour’s voice surges forward uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society that sees women as superficial objects of desire rather than multidimensional, autonomous subjects. Mansour is a poet the world needs today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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-freed MacArthur. As this unlikely acquaintance grows, however, O’Connell not only comes to question the possibility of ever coming to any conclusion about what actually drove this previously law-abiding local eccentric to murder two strangers in the summer of 1982, but also calls into doubt his own motivations for embarking on the project in the first place, and the risks he is taking in his own life to complete it.Buy A Thread of Violence: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-thread-of-violenceMark O'Connell is an award-winning Irish writer. His first book, To Be a Machine, won the 2018Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019, he became the firstever non-fiction writer to win the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second book,Notes From an Apocalypse was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He is a contributor to the NewYork Review of Books, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker.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.

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.