The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Shakespeare and Company
Shakespeare and Company
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Discover your next favourite book, or take a deep dive into the mind of an author you love, with The Shakespeare and Company Interview podcast. Now also the home of Editions: A Shakespeare and Company x Faber Production. 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, Hari 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 2d ago

    Editions - Episode 2 - Illusions with Megan Nolan

    In the second episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist Megan Nolan to discuss Illusions by Ruth Rehmann, in a new translation by Rob Madole, the latest title in the Faber Editions imprint. First published in Germany in 1959 and lost to English-language readers for decades, the novel follows four employees of a vast West German corporation across a single weekend. Cinematic, fragmented, and seductively modernist, it is at once an intimate and hypnotic portrait of four inner lives and an incisive state-of-the-nation novel about West Germany's postwar "economic miracle" - and the illusions that sustain it. Our conversation covers Rehmann's place in the influential German postwar literary movement Gruppe 47, the novel's debts to and divergences from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses, the way that the war haunts a generation trying to forget it, the mischievous omniscient window cleaner who watches over the story, and what it means for a woman writer to be faulted, as contemporary reviewers said of Rehmann, for "an excess of contemporaneity." Buy Illusions UK: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571396580-illusions-faber-editions/ Rest of World: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/illusions-faber-editions  Megan Nolan's novels Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings are also available from Shakespeare and Company, and your local independent bookstore. Sign up to Faber's Heritage Subscription, featuring all Faber Editions titles: Subscribers get a book in the post each month for just £9 alongside a curated email with exclusive extra content about the book and its author. https://tr.ee/DsDYp5 Books & Authors Discussed The Tin Drum — Günter Grass Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf Ulysses — James Joyce The Forged Coupon — Leo Tolstoy Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis Acts of Desperation — Megan Nolan Ordinary Human Failings — Megan Nolan Films/TV Shows Discussed Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — dir. Chantal Akerman Playtime — dir. Jacques Tati The White Ribbon — dir. Michael Haneke Frozen Land — dir. Aku Louhimies Bios Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in New York. Her most recent novel is Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), chosen as one of the best books of the year by The Guardian, The Times, and Sunday Times. It was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Nero Prize for Fiction, The Gordon Burn Prize, The Royal Society of Literature Encore Award, and longlisted for the Women's Prize. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) was an international bestseller, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Time. Nolan was also among The Observer’s Best Debut Novelists of 2021. Ella Griffiths is Faber's Head of Classics & Heritage Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company Listen to Alex Freiman Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3dbKbpFyqPbklwEdeLYYZR?si=Q5vy9KkRTrqf1BqU1v33cg Insta: @alex.guitarfreiman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Editions - Episode 2 - Illusions with Megan Nolan

  2. Jul 22

    Paris, Deconstructed: Amit Chaudhuri’s Château Rouge

    Amit Chaudhuri joins Adam Biles to discuss his new novel Chateau Rouge, set not in the postcard Paris of Hemingway and Midnight in Paris, but in the neighbourhood around Gare du Nord — a Paris that resists being known, curated, or confirmed. Chaudhuri talks about writing against the "already known" city, drawing on Roland Barthes and the idea of "heritage modernity" to explain why he wanted to deconstruct Paris's status as a museum-piece rather than a lived-in place. He discusses his narrator's disorientation on arrival, the subtle presence of race and visibility in the book, and how global events — the Gilets Jaunes, the Notre Dame fire — pass through the novel as lived, unfinished moments rather than history. The conversation turns, too, to marriage: how a decades-old, unread copy of A Moveable Feast, gifted by his wife, becomes a quiet emotional throughline. Buy Château Rouge: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/chateau-rouge * Amit Chaudhuri is the author of nine novels, whose ‘languorous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to put in any category at all’ (Salman Rushdie). He is also an essayist, poet, short story writer, singer and composer. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Listen 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.

    Paris, Deconstructed: Amit Chaudhuri’s Château Rouge

  3. Jul 8

    The End of Everything, with M. John Harrison

    M. John Harrison returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with Adam Biles about his new novel, The End of Everything, a disaster story set in a "wrong UK" where societal collapse coincides with the arrival of an alien presence, and the strange shape-shifting "artefacts" it leaves behind. Harrison discusses writing an "epistemological" catastrophe rather than a physical one, the decades of discipline it took to trust readers without over-explaining, and how the book's permacrisis mirrors post-2008 Britain and Brexit. He talks character-building from "bits and pieces" of real people, why he refuses to fully reveal his monsters, and how AI anxieties seeped into a book largely conceived before ChatGPT.  Buy The End of Everything: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/anabasis-2 * MICHAEL JOHN HARRISON is the author of, among others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Prize (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light), the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing) and the Goldsmiths Prize (The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again). He lives in Shropshire. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Listen 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.

    The End of Everything, with M. John Harrison

  4. Jun 24

    Alain Delon, Murder and Paris ’68, with Edward Chisholm

    Edward Chisholm joins Adam Biles to discuss Murder in Paris '68, his deep-dive into the Markovic Affair, one of the most explosive scandals of postwar France. In October 1968, the dismembered body of Stevan Markovic, a Yugoslav immigrant and bodyguard to Alain Delon, was found on the outskirts of Paris. The case implicated France's most iconic film star, the Corsican “milieu”, and eventually the Élysée Palace itself. Chisholm traces how he stumbled onto the story in an obscure Parisian crime library, and what followed: years of obsessive research, classified archives in the suburbs of Versailles, and a surveillance-heavy reading desk watched over by attentive archivists. The conversation covers Delon's impenetrable persona, the Ripley parallels, France's Resistance-era ties between politicians and gangsters, and why a murder nobody solved still can't be fully declassified today. Buy Murder in Paris ’68: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/murder-in-paris-68-2 * Edward Chisholm was born in Dorset, England, and moved to Paris in 2012 where he worked all manner of low-paid jobs, from waiting and bar work to museum security and market hand, while trying to build a career as a writer. His memoir, A Waiter In Paris has sold over 100,000 copies and has been translated into several languages. Now, Chisholm makes a living as a creative director, author and screenwriter, based in Switzerland. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times magazine. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Listen 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.

    Alain Delon, Murder and Paris ’68, with Edward Chisholm

  5. Jun 15

    BLOOMCAST: 🎬Ulysses Movie Watch-along Special🎬

    Recorded for Bloomsday 2026. If you're in Paris and it's still June 16th, join us between 2pm and 5pm at Shakespeare and Company, 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, Paris. Find the film here:  https://vimeo.com/408613317 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7xAM_eXuuk Adam Biles and Lex Paulson reunite after an eighteen-month hiatus for a live commentary on the 1967 Joseph Strick film adaptation of Ulysses. They discuss Joyce's real-life role launching Dublin's first cinema, the film's scandalous festival history (Cannes brawl, Irish ban, New Zealand sex-segregated screenings), and Milo O'Shea's towering performance as Leopold Bloom. Along the way: Circe's Monty Python energy, the "Me Too" moment, and why Joyce (thanks to Nora) remains decades ahead of us all. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    BLOOMCAST: 🎬Ulysses Movie Watch-along Special🎬

  6. Jun 10

    Fear Less: Tracy K. Smith on Poetry in Perilous Times

    Tracy K. Smith comes to Shakespeare and Company for a conversation with Adam Biles. They discuss her book Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, a bold manifesto on poetry as a tool for deeper living, clearer thinking, and more compassionate citizenship. Drawing on her time as US Poet Laureate, Smith reflects on taking poetry to rural America, and how poems, unlike political debate, can open rather than entrench. She talks about the origins of Fear Less, and why she chose to write a love letter to the art form rather than a polemic. Smith also reads from her forthcoming collection The Forest, sharing new poems on war, complicity, the divine feminine, and an expansive, unsettling "us" that includes those we revile. Buy Fear Less: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/fear-less-4 Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Her latest book is Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (2025). In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.  Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Listen 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.

    Fear Less: Tracy K. Smith on Poetry in Perilous Times

  7. May 27

    Editions - Episode 1 - Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes with Taìno Mendez

    In the debut episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist and performer Taìno Mendez to discuss Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke, the twentieth title in the Faber Editions imprint. Published in 1965 and long out of print, the novel follows Oliver, a Black teenager spending a final summer before college in the eccentric Michigan household of his wealthy patron Etta Klein and his aunt Harriet. Witty, camp, and shot through with tragedy, it defies easy categorisation; a drawing-room satire, a coming-of-age story, and a quietly radical work of civil rights era fiction. The conversation covers the novel's Wildean wit, its oblique engagement with race and queerness, the role of photographer Carl Van Vechten in the Harlem Renaissance, and what it means to write against expectation. Buy Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes UK: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571391783-ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editions/ Rest of World: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editions Buy Rainbow Milk: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/rainbow-milk Sign up to Faber’s Heritage Subscription, featuring all Faber Editions titles: Subscribers get a book in the post each month for just £9 alongside a curated email with exclusive extra content about the book and its author. https://tr.ee/DsDYp5 Books & Authors Discussed The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze — William Saroyan (foreword by Stephen Fry) Mrs Caliban — Rachel Ingalls Palace of the Peacock — Wilson Harris Omeros — Derek Walcott The Flower Beneath the Foot — Ronald Firbank Sorrow in Sunlight (retitled Prancing N-) — Ronald Firbank Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin Another Country — James Baldwin À rebours (Against Nature) — Joris-Karl Huysmans En rade (Stranded) — Joris-Karl Huysmans Checkout 19 — Claire-Louise Bennett Rainbow Milk — Taìno Mendez Ulysses — James Joyce  Works by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch also mentioned Illusions— Ruth Lehmann (upcoming Faber Editions title, discussed with Megan Nolan on our next podcast episode) Films/TV Shows Discussed Get Out — dir. Jordan Peele Lovers Rock — dir. Steve McQueen The Defiant Ones — starring Sidney Poitier Playtime — dir. Jacques Tati Severance Bios Taíno Mendez is a novelist based in the southern English town of Margate. Their first novel, Rainbow Milk, was an Observer Top Ten Best Debuts choice for 2020 and widely named as one of the best novels of the year, being shortlisted for a British Book Award and for the Jhalak Prize, Polari Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. Their non-fiction has been published in a variety of outlets including the WritersMosaic, the London Review of Books, Esquire, the Guardian and British Vogue. They are currently working on their second novel.  Ella Griffiths is Faber's Head of Classics & Heritage Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company Listen to Alex Freiman Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3dbKbpFyqPbklwEdeLYYZR?si=Q5vy9KkRTrqf1BqU1v33cg Insta : @alex.guitarfreiman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Editions - Episode 1 - Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes with Taìno Mendez

  8. May 20

    Lea Ypi: Dignity, Fiction, and the Lives History Erases

    Philosopher and author Lea Ypi joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company Paris to discuss her latest book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, an extraordinary work blending biography, history, and fiction. When a photo of her grandparents' 1941 honeymoon went viral in Albania, sparking online abuse, Ypi found herself compelled to investigate her grandmother Leman's life in full. The search took her into the Albanian Secret Service archives, back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and deep into questions of memory, belonging, and what it means to preserve dignity in a world that conspires against it. Ypi discusses the dual narrative voices of the book, the "silence of the archives," the ethics of fictionalising real lives, and how writing as a novelist rather than a philosopher transformed her understanding of her subject. A conversation about history, imagination, and the moral necessity of hope. Buy Indignity: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/indignity-2 * Lea Ypi holds the Ralph Miliband Chair in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Biography Award. It is translated into over thirty languages. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Listen 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.

    Lea Ypi: Dignity, Fiction, and the Lives History Erases
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Discover your next favourite book, or take a deep dive into the mind of an author you love, with The Shakespeare and Company Interview podcast. Now also the home of Editions: A Shakespeare and Company x Faber Production. 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, Hari 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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