Episodi
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Why are we so obsessed with the apocalypse? Is it a reaction to the state of the worldâclimate catastrophe, regional wars threatening global conflict, pandemic scares, and the unsettling rise of AIâor does it run deeper? Is it inherent to the modern world or, perhaps, the human condition? And why are we so captivated by apocalyptic stories in books, films, TV shows, video games, and artâsometimes improbable, sometimes terrifyingly possible?
Dorian Lynskey explores these questions in Everything Must Go. He starts in ancient times, with a detour through the Book of Revelation, before focusing on the 19th century, when humanity began to grasp that scientific advances could both transform and destroy the world. The 20th century brings the bomb, robots, and intelligent machinesâthe seeds of a potential end. Like the best non-fiction, Lynskeyâs focus on a specific subjectâarmageddonâoffers deeper insights into how we view ourselves, interact with others, and perceive our world.
Buy Everything Must Go: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/everything-must-go-5
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Dorian Lynskey writes about music, film, books and politics for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, the New Statesman, GQ, Billboard, Empire, and Mojo. His first book was 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs. A study of thirty-three pivotal songs with a political message, it was NME's Book of the Year and a 'Music Book of the Year' in The Daily Telegraph. His second book, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984, was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize. He hosts the podcasts 'Origin Story' and 'Oh God, What Now?'.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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On the night of Friday, 13 November 2015, three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France during a football match between France and Germany, attended by President François Hollande. By 1am the next morning, 130 victims were dead, and 416 others were injured, many critically. Seven attackers were killed, and two more died in a shootout with police days later.
In September 2021, nearly six years later, the trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the attacks began in a specially built courtroom near the Palais de Justice. Fourteen were present, six tried in absentia, and only one, Salah Abdeslam, had directly participated in the attacks. The others were involved in planning, logistics, or assisting the terrorists. With many defendants refusing to testify and the trial featuring mostly secondary figures, some doubted whether it would be meaningful. However, in V13, Emmanuel CarrĂšreâs gripping account, it becomes clear that the trial was far from a failure. As he writes, it became "a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity and presence.â The book, based on CarrĂšre's weekly dispatches for LâObs, immerses readers in the trial, offering a vivid, firsthand perspective of this historic event.
Buy V13: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/v13
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Emmanuel CarrĂšre, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life As A Russian Novel, Class Trip, Limonov and The Mustache.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Episodi mancanti?
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Denis Hirsonâs My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah can be read as many different books. It can be read as a new, deeply personal, take on a pivotal episode in the history of South Africa. It can be read as a tender reflection on the mind of the author as he teetered on the cusp of adulthood. It can be read as a portrait of one particular wing of the Jewish diaspora, at one very particular moment in time. And it can be read as an account of how trauma is passed from one generation to the next, but also how with every new generation we are offered the opportunity of recoveryâŠif only we will grasp it.
My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah focuses primarily on the life of the author in the early 1960s, when he was between the age of nine and thirteen, and when the politics of his homeland was in turmoil after the brutal Sharpeville Massacre, carried out by the apartheid regime. Indeed, itâs these very politics that are going to impose themselves in a real and immediate fashion on the authorâs world, not only shattering his idea of family, of community, of home, but also setting his life on a course that will ultimately see him pitch up in Paris.
Buy My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/my-thirty-minute-bar-mitzvah
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Denis Hirson has lived in France since 1975, yet has remained true to the title of one of his prose poems, âThe long-distance South Africanâ. Most of his nine books, both poetry and prose, are concerned with the memory of the apartheid years in South Africa. Two of his previous titles, The House Next Door to Africa and I Remember King Kong (the Boxer) were South African bestsellers. His most recent books are Ma langue au chat, sub-titled âtortures and delights of an English-speaker in Parisâ, and a book of conversations with William Kentridge, Footnotes for the Panther.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called ClĂ©mentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isnât sure heâs ready for fatherhood⊠Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space.
A novel in the key of Ăric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people weâve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people whoâve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
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Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including FlĂąneuse: Women Walk the City, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.
Born in Philadelphia, Amanda Dennis studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writersâ Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett.
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Colombe Schneckâs THE PARIS TRILOGY is a bookâor rather three books, first published separately in Frenchâabout growing up, about friendship, about love, about family, about class, about womanhood and the patriarchyâŠand about swimming. In short, about every side of a life, as it just happens to take place in Paris. Rendered in crisp, fluid English by translators Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrerâwho joins the conversationâ THE PARIS TRILOGY begins with SEVENTEEN, a searingly frank account of the abortion the writer had as a teenager, passes through FRIENDSHIP, the devastating record of a childhood bond cut brutally short, and concludes with SWIMMING: A LOVE STORY, the chronicle of how this particular sport helped her build, and then grieve, a relationship.
Buy The Paris Trilogy: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-paris-trilogy
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Colombe Schneck is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, she has received prizes from the Académie Française, Madame Figaro and the Society of French Writers. The recipient of scholarships from the Villa Medicis in Rome and the Institut Français, as well as a Stendhal grant which allows French writers to do research and write abroad, she also spent fifteen years as a broadcaster for Canal Plus, France TV and Radio France. She was born in Paris in 1966 where she still lives, is a graduate of Sciences Po and Université de Paris II with a degree in Public Law.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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A woman speaks to us from her room in a residential home, of some description. She reflects on her life, her family, her pets, on timeâthe past, present and the futureâon Manson Family Alumnus Leslie Van Houyten, on History, on Death, on the Occult, on what it means to be âsensitiveââŠand so much more besides. All the while she is distracted, bothered, grounded, and charmed by her fellow residents, a rag-tag slice of American life if ever a novel saw oner. As you can imagine from a Lynne Tillman bookâindeed, as you would hopeâthings get discursive, things get disrupted, things get WEIRD, very quickly. First published in 2006, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY achieves the eerie feat of growing more pertinent as time goes on. Deeply aware of the tradition of the novelâperhaps the American novel in particularâTillman is also confident enough in the newness of her project, and mischievous enough in her approach, to subvert that tradition almost to breaking point. To echo the words of George Saunders, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY is âbeautiful, sacred, insane.â
Buy American Genius, A Comedy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/american-genius
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Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy; and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warholâs Factory 1965â1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame Realism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Artsâ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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This weekâs guest is Aysegul Savas, whose mesmerising third novel, The Anthropologists is about a great many things. Itâs about what it means to leave oneâs home. Itâs about attempting to lay down roots elsewhere. Itâs about the mystery, banality, and all-consuming nature of love. Itâs about the dynamics of friendship, and how those are stress-tested by life. Itâs about growing up and growing old. Itâs about how our lives are shaped by ritualsâŠand by the lack of them. And itâs about how anxiety-inducing it can be trying to buy a flat. More concretely, The Anthropologists is about Asya and Manu, young expats in an unnamed foreign city. Asya is a documentary maker, Manu works for an NGO. They lead a care-free, meticulously tended-to life of nights out, mornings in, coffees and pints with friends, and evenings of poetry with their eccentric upstairs neighbour. But all of thisâits sustainability, its ârealnessââ is called into question by their decision to begin flat-hunting, as well as by other life changesâchanges that are in their lives, but out of their control.
Buy The Anthropologists here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-anthropologists
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AysegĂŒl Savas is the author of the acclaimed novels Walking on the Ceiling and White on White. Her work has been translated into six languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. 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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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For this special episode, recorded live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Adam Biles was joined by novelists Lauren Groff and Neel Mukherjee for a wide-ranging discussion that takes the temperature (and the pulse!) of the book industry, from bookshops, to publishers, to prizes, to festivals... Enjoy!
Buy The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-shakespeare-and-company-book-of-interviews
Buy The Vaster Wilds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-vaster-wilds-3
Buy Choice: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/choice-2
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Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Timesâbestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and
Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indiesâ Choice Award, Franceâs Grand Prix de lâHĂ©roĂŻne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Neel Mukherjee won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010 for his debut novel A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. His novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and heralded as 'Stunning ... a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today' (NPR). Choice, a novel as triptych, is his latest book.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Rachel Kushnerâs fourth novel Creation Lake is a spy novel stacked with ideas. As our fast-thinking, gun-packing protagonist wends her way down to the south of France, chargedâby forces unknownâwith infiltrating and sowing chaos at a commune of eco-warriors, her mission leads her into exhilarating reflections on activism, on charisma, on neanderthals and other lost races of archaic humans, on the remodellingâsome might say devastationâof rural France in the name of progress, on loss in its myriad forms, on the shadows loss leaves behind, on Guy Debord, on the apparently charmed life of Louis Ferdinand CĂ©line, on Daft Punkâs ubiquitous Get Lucky, on space, on time, on spacetime, and on the many paths she has and hasnât taken in her life⊠As that list hopefully demonstrates, the scope of Creation Lake is vast, stretching from the micro of the personal to the macro of the cosmosâand touching on everything in between. And yet incredibly, Creation Lake never feels weighed down by all this. Quite the opposite. It hurls forward at exactly the dizzying speed youâd expect from the wise-cracking secret agent at its heart. All in all, Creation Lake is quite the ride. Recorded in Paris in March 2024.
Buy Creation Lake: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/creation-lake-3
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Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, as well as a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K. Her new book, THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020 will be published in April 2021. She has won the Prix MĂ©dicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Our guest in the writerâs studio this week is Ferdia Lennon, whose debut novel Glorious Exploits depicts the ancient world in a way readers will never have experienced it before. Set in Syracuse in 412 BC, after the catastrophic attempt by Athens to invade the city, Lampo and Gelon, two out-of-work potters, have the harebrained idea of staging a production of Medeaâperhaps the greatest play, by unquestionably the greatest playwright of their timeâusing, as actors, the Athenian soldiers held as prisoners in the quarry. And if that premise werenât intriguing enough on itâs own, itâs the writerâs execution that really sets Glorious Exploits apart, as Lennon eschews the stilted formality that tales of Antiquity often lapse into, in favour of an always lively, frequently fruity, distinctly Irish vernacular. Glorious Exploits is a story about friendship, about art, about love, and about violence. Itâs also a story about storiesâthose we tell each other, those we tell ourselves, and the power they have to spirit us to other worlds entirely.
Buy Glorious Exploits: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/glorious-exploits
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Ferdia Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and Libyan father. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. His short stories have appeared in publications such as the Irish Times and the Stinging Fly. In 2019 and 2021, he received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Our guest this week is Roxy Dunn, whose debut novel As Young As This is a meticulous examination of the lives and loves of young women today. Told, strikingly, in the second person, it is structured by the the succession of first boys, then men in the protagonist Margotâs life, and populated by dysfunctional friends and a wisecracking, but deeply caring family. As Young As This is as witty as it is sincere, as revealing as it is touching. Pandora Sykes said that âwith glorious attention to detail and emotional fluency, Dunn charts the ways in which we are built and broken by loveâ while Daisy Buchanan called As Young As This 'Raw, funny and beautifulâ adding that itâs a âreally gorgeously observed novel about youth and womanhoodâ
Buy As Young As This: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/as-young-as-this
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Roxy Dunn is a Writer/Performer and graduate of the BBC Comedy Writersroom. Sheâs acted in multiple television sitcoms and her shows have received sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and SOHO Theatre. Her scripts have been optioned by several production companies and her pilot Useless Millennials was commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As Young as This is her first novel.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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School of Instructions, the latest work by Ishion Hutchinson, draws from the time he spent in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, to foreground the experienceâbrutal, significant, but long overlookedâof West Indian volunteers in the First World War. This book length poem is a sensorial voyage into the convoys, garrisons and trenches of the Middle Eastern war theatre in all its monstrousness and disorientation, in which Ishion Hutchinson masterfully deploys his immense gift for spiriting vivid, textured, and living images from the page. The poem also juxtaposes the horror of war with the life of Godspeed, an ordinaryâby which I mean mischievous and sweet-naturedâboy growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. And it is perhaps this interweaving of narratives, of epochs, of worlds, of the micro and the macro, that makes School of Instructions not just a significant work of poetry, but also an important act of historical empathy, reaching back more than a century to highlight how the ossified remains of empire continue to distort the lives of the people of once colonised lands. School of Instructionsâwhich was shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prizeâis a profound, affecting book, quite unlike any other work of poetry.
Buy School of Instructions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/school-of-instructions
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Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among honors.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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This weekâs guest is Michael Donkor whose new novel Grow Where They Fall is a meticulous and tender exploration of two formative moments in the life of one Kwame Akromah, twenty years apart. Kwame is Black, Gay, British of Ghanian descent, a dedicated teacher, a dependable friendâcharacter traits and conditions of life that weave around each other and interact, with unpredictable resultsâwhether for the ten-year old boy or the grown manâat times lifting Kwame up, at other times dragging him down. Grow Where They Fall manages to be as gentle as it is spirited, as moving as is fun to read, and Donkor handles the changing register of life, and of London, in these different decades, with skill and verve. It is a book not just about growing up, and perhaps growing old, but also, in a sense, about growing out â growing out of the roles handed down to us by our families, growing out of friendships, growing out of jobs, and growing out of our own fixed ideas about ourselves. Itâs also a book which asks the essential human question: Is it ever really possible to know where we are going without first knowing where we have come from?
Buy Grow Where They Fall: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/grow-where-they-fall
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Michael Donkor was born in London in 1985. He was raised in a Ghanaian household where talking lots and reading lots were vigorously encouraged. Michael read English at Oxford where he developed a particular interest in the works of Woolf, Lessing and Achebe, and later undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Michael worked in publishing for a number of years, but eventually decided to put his literary enthusiasms to other uses: in 2010, he retrained as an English teacher, teaching A-Level students, trying to develop a curious excitement about books and storytelling within his students. He now lives in Portugal, where he works as a bookseller. In 2014 Michael was selected by Writers Centre Norwich for their Inspires Mentoring Scheme, and worked with mentor Daniel Hahn. His first novel, HOLD, which explores Ghanaian heritage and questions surrounding sexuality, identity and sacrifice, was published by 4th Estate in 2018, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prizes. Michael was also selected by Scottish Poet Laureate Jackie Kay as one of the most important contemporary British BAME authors. He has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, BBC Radio 3, the TLS and the Independent.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The seven stories in Samanta Schweblinâs Seven Empty Houses are not just about housesâhow they contain us, how they constrain usâbut are also about the families compressed in them, the objects stored in them, the neighbours that circle themâŠand the trauma that has soaked into their walls over years past, and that is now seeping slowly out, poisoning the lives of their inhabitants.
Buy Seven Empty Houses: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/seven-empty-houses-2
Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections and two novels, which have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017, and her short-story collection Seven Empty Houses won the National Book Award for Translated Literature 2022. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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So much has been written about the imminent transformation that Artificial Intelligence will bring to our world. But it is often hard to get much of a sense of what that will mean on a personal levelâfor our work, for our leisure and, perhaps most importantly of all, for our families. What improvements will result? What new tensions will arise? What devastation will be wrought? In HUM, Helen Phillips takes these questions and masterfully dramatises them in the lives of a financially struggling family of four. As we spend time with mother May, father Jem, and kids Lu and Cy, we not only experience the very real, very claustrophobic presence of this invasive, dehumanising technology, but are also forced to reckon with the truly thorny question of whether some of the gifts it offersâforemost among them reassurance concerning the wellbeing of those we loveâare a worthy altar upon which to sacrificeâŠwell, pretty everything else. Just as with her much celebrated 2019 novel THE NEED, in HUM Helen Phillips has once again used the lens of deeply compelling speculative fiction to help us better understand the world as it changes around us.
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Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including the novel The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019; Chatto & Windus, 2019), which was long-listed for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. Her novel HUM is forthcoming in August 2024 (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books).
Helen's short story collection Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016) received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) was named a notable collection by The Story Prize and was re-released in 2023. She is also the author of the childrenâs eco-adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012).
Helen has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writerâs Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, and the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award.
Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times, among others. Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, and Spanish.
A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson, their children, and their dog.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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We recently welcomed Catherine Lacey to the bookshop to discuss her vertiginous latest novel Biography of X.
Ostensibly the quest of a journalist, C.M. Lucca, to discover more about the life of her late wifeâan artist who went by many names, but who she knew only as Xâit quickly becomes clear that, in Biography of X, itâs not just one life being called into question, but a genre of literature, a method of reading, a manner of telling stories, a concept of history, perhaps even truth itself.
Buy Biography of X here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/biography-of-x-5
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Catherine Lacey is the author of four books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, Pew, and Biography of X. Her work has appeared in Harperâs, Vogue, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is a Granta Best of Young American Novelist, a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of the 2021 New York Public Libraryâs Young Lions Fiction Award.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Set in small-town, post-crash Ireland, The Bee Sting follows the Barnes familyâDickie, Imelda, Cass and PJâas the fabric of their lives first frays at the edges, then begins to unravel completely. The Barnesâ are endearing, and complex, and funny, and infuriating⊠In short, one of the most realistic and memorable portrayals of a family youâll find in contemporary fiction.
Throughout the book The Bee Stingâs focus masterfully expands and contracts between the minutiae of adolescent friendship, marital tensions and financial woes, and the threat of full scale global apocalypse, while touching on pretty much everything in between.
It is a book about families, how they build you up and how they knock you down, about how both the lived past and the imagined future weigh on our lives, about coincidence, about loneliness, about optimism, about love and loss, about climate change, and about shame⊠itâs also a book, unsurprisingly, about beesâalthough perhaps not in the way that you might think.
Buy The Bee Sting: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-bee-sting-3
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Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975 and is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, The Mark and the Void and The Bee Sting. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void won the Everyman Wodehouse Prize. The Bee Sting won the Nero Book of the Year Award and the An Post Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Writersâ Prize for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Paul Murray lives in Dublin.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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A woman tells her son about his early life. About the months and years that he will by now have forgotten. When he was a baby, then a toddler, and when she was going into battle every day. For him first, and only then for herself. Itâs a battle fought on many fronts. Against exhaustion, against time, against the loss of selfhood, against an increasingly absent husband, and against a society that values women less than men, and perhaps mothers least of all. And with no guarantee that she, that they, will come out on top. Between a testimony and a confession, between a lesson and a warning to the man her boy will become Soldier Sailor is devastating, uplifting, punishing, galvanising, vertiginous, infuriating, honest, raw, painful, and illuminatingâŠin short, as close a representation of the early days of parenthood that can be committed to words.
Bu Soldier Sailor here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/soldier-sailor-2
Clare Kilroy's debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as compelling... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed. Educated at Trinity College, she lives In Dublin.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The biographies of several artists, all named G, form a kind of exoskeleton to Rachel Cuskâs latest novel Parade, encasing the bookâs other captivating strandsâthe story of an unprovoked attack on a Parisian street, the story of a couple on a remote island, the story of a suicide at a museum, the story of the death of a mother. Elements which themselves are arranged into four sectionsâThe Stuntman, The Midwife, The Diver and The Spyâthat, set down beside each other, interact and converse thematically, philosophically, but also alchemically, like a kind of a very contemporary, and very Cuskian take on the Tarot. Parade is a novel that uncovers and disrupts systems of control on every scaleâfrom systems of individual thought, to the systems of familial hegemony, to systems of societal oppression. Itâs also beautifully intricate, strikingly forthright and, at times, startlingly funny. In conversation with Adam Biles.
Buy Parade: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/parade-2
Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Lifeâs Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and non-fiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow. 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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Last week we were joined in the bookshop by Hari Kunzru, whose new novel Blue Ruin is a deeply unsettling, and intensely thought provoking reflection on the impact capital has on people, but also on art, and those who create it. It is the perfect final instalmentâalongside White Tears and Red Pillâin Hari Kunzruâs own trois couleurs âa loose trilogy that has taken the temperature of our modern world, and found it to be profoundly unwell.
Buy Blue Ruin here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/blue-ruin
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HARI KUNZRU is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the âEasy Chairâ column for Harperâs Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.
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-england
Listen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on PatreonHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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