The Shakespeare and Company Interview Shakespeare and Company

James—the new novel by Percival Everett—retells, reframes, and reimagines Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the black man whose flight from slavery quickly entangles with the journey of Huck, on the run after faking his own death to escape his violent father. James gives us the events of Twain’s picaresque from a vital new standpoint—opening up previously unexplored plains of character consciousness as it does so—expanding and subverting the original story. And the novel doesn’t just fill in the blanks about Jim’s movements when our protagonists are separated, but also wrests the narrative arc itself in new and astonishing directions.
Buy James here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/james-4

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The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.
With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .
From the shadows of Huck Finn’s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.
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Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.
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 Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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We were joined by countercultural historian Pat Thomas, and Peter Hale, manager of the Ginsberg estate, and discover their new collaboration Material Wealth Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg.
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A prolific poet, raconteur, activist, and thinker, Allen Ginsberg was also a prolific collector, meticulously saving letters, postcards, draft notes and manuscripts, photographs and snapshots, appearance bills and rally broadsheets, not only featuring him personally, but also his fellow poets, singers, lovers, writers, journey companions, friends, and agitators. Gathered here publicly for the first time is his personal archive of events and experiences documenting his life as a young man, breakaway poet, expansive spirit, curious intellectual traveler, and relentless enthusiast of the provocative and the profane.
There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored and archived at Stanford University’s Allen Ginsberg collection. Counterculture historian Pat Thomas, with the full cooperation of the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Peter Hale, has compiled and annotated a remarkable volume of material, unearthing in the process one astounding find after another. The result is a tome of previously unpublished historical paperwork and vintage graphics and photographs and ephemera that promises an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century.

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Pat Thomas is a counterculture historian and archival music producer (and liner-note writer) whose expertise and interests have helped him author such books as Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975 and Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary. He has co-curated Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980, co-edited My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed, an anthology of interviews about the iconic musician, and contributed to The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane: The Long Lost Rock n’ Roll Detective and Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack. Thomas was a consultant on the PBS documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and compiled the 3-CD box set The Last Word on First Blues for the Allen Ginsberg Estate (1970s recordings of Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Arthur Russell), and the 2-CD set Songs of Innocence and Experience of Ginsberg’s 1969 recordings (with Don Cherry and Elvin Jones) putting William Blake poems to music with vocals by Allen.
Peter Hale grew up in Italy, Germany, and then Boulder, CO where he earned a BA in Classics, Greek & Latin, from the University of Colorado, all the while attending classes in music, poetry and meditation at Naropa University. He became part of the staff at Allen Ginsberg’s office in 1992, and in 1997 helped craft his posthumous estate, which he currently manages. He studied Guitar with Dave Van Ronk & Danny Kalb, and Piano with Peter Barbieri. He currently produces his own music, and djs around NYC. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens.
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 Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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On this very special January night, editor extraordinaire John Freeman was joined by three of his star contributors, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and Deborah Landau to bid farewell to his literary journal.
Buy Freeman’s Conclusions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/freemans-conclusions
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Jakuta Alikavazovic (b.1979) is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her first novel, Corps Volatils (2008) won the Goncourt Prize for Best First Novel and her second and third novels, Le Londres-Luxor (2010) and La Blonde et Le Bunker (2012) won prizes in France and Italy. Her most recent novel, Night as it Falls (L’Avancee de la Nuit), was published by Faber in 2020. Her essay Comme un Ciel en Nous (Like a Sky in Us) won the Prix Medicis Essai 2021 and her collected newspaper columns Faites Un Voeu (Make a Wish) were published in 2022. She is working on a new novel to be delivered in 2023.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the author of 8 works of fiction, including the award-winning The Sound of Things Falling, The Shape of the Ruins and Retrospective. His work is published in 30 languages.
Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons. Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, as well as Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program
John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s and the author and editor of a dozen books, including Wind, Trees, Dictionary of the Undoing, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Orion, and been translated into over twenty languages. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York City, where he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf and hosts the monthly California Book Club -- a free online discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature -- for Alta magazine.
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 Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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In early February, we hosted a riotous, tender, enchanting and uplifting evening of poetry and prose with the irrepressible Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen. After their readings they sat down with Adam Biles for a chat about friendship, a theme that unites their work.
Buy Hollie McNish’s Lobster here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/lobster
Buy Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/boy-friends-2
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Hollie McNish is a poet, author and lover based between Glasgow and Cambridge. She won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her poetic parenting memoir – Nobody Told Me – of which The Scotsman stated ‘the world needs this book’. She has published four further lovely collections of poetry –Papers, Cherry Pie, Plum, and Slug, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was published in French by Le Castor Astral under the title Je souhaite seulement que tu fasses quelque chose de toi. Her new book, Lobster and other things I'm learning to love, is out now and according to her dad is 'her best work yet'. She loves writing.
Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, and the Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 to rave reviews and was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. He’s unfurled three collections of poetry, the most recent being The Cat Prince & Other Poems—which won the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Poetry 2023. Pedersen has been shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and The Saltire National Book Awards, and won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. His work has attracted praise from the likes of: Stephen Fry, Irvine Welsh, Kae Tempest, Jackie Kay, Sara Pascoe, Nicola Sturgeon & many more.
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 Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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Our guest this week is Brandon Taylor, whose new book The Late Americans is a stark retooling of the campus novel for the 21st century. Taking a university town in Iowa as his canvas, Taylor depicts the lives of a loose group of friends and associates: Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima—students of writing and dance—as time barrels them towards the end of their studies and the harsh realities of the so-called “real” world beyond. The novel lives in Taylor’s delicate and perceptive handling of the complicated interplay of money, class, race, art and sex—the bonds each of these can form between us and the divides they create. It is a book rich in ideas and reflections about contemporary life, contemporary America in particular, but these would all be for nothing without the meticulously wrought human comedy—in all its beauty and ugliness—at its core.
Buy The Late Americans: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-late-americans
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
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 Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on Patreon
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Last week, we were joined in the bookshop by Annabelle Hirsch whose new book A History of Women in 101 Objects not only gives us an untold and innovative history of the world— a history takes us from the dawn of civilisation to the present day, through ancient Egypt, medieval Venice, revolutionary France and the roaring twenties—but also launches an interrogation into the practice and the purpose of history itself: how and why it’s told, who gets to tell it, and what gets cast into the shadows along the way. 
Buy A History of Women in 101 Objects: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-history-of-women-in-101-objects
Annabelle Hirsch, born in 1986, has German and French roots. She studied art history, dramatics and philosophy in Munich and Paris, and works as a cultural journalist for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and various other magazines. She writes short stories and translates French literature. She lives between Rome and 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 Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Get bonus content on Patreon
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.