Afleveringen
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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
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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
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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.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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
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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
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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
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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
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An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-arundhati-roy
Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, Adam Biles sits down with Arundhati Roy to discuss her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy reflects on writing a “novelist’s memoir,” where memory and imagination blur, and explores her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. The conversation moves from Roy’s unconventional childhood in Kerala to her formative years in architecture, activism, and the aftermath of The God of Small Things. She discusses resisting literary celebrity, embracing political responsibility, and finding strength in chosen families and friendship networks. With candour and wit, Roy rejects reductive “therapy narratives,” instead offering a portrait of identity shaped by contradiction, resilience, and love.
Buy Mother Mary Comes to Me: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/mother-mary-comes-to-me
Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of non-fiction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and The Architecture of Modern Empire.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, Paris
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Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Adam Biles speaks with Ben Lerner about his novel Transcription, a formally inventive meditation on technology, memory, and human connection.
Beginning with the novel’s deceptively simple premise (a writer loses his recording device and reconstructs an interview from memory) the conversation expands into questions of mediation, voice, and authenticity. Lerner explores how devices reshape attention and relationships, suggesting that humans themselves function as “media,” transmitting voices across time and between generations.
The discussion moves between the philosophical and the intimate: from the limits of digital communication to the emotional power of disembodied voices, from intergenerational care to the fragile transmission of experience. Ultimately, Transcription emerges as a reflection on how stories, memories, and voices persist—less as fixed recordings than as living, shifting acts of interpretation.
Buy Transcription: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/transcription-4
Ben 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 other 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.
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
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Why Translate Homer Again? Daniel Mendelsohn on his new Odyssey
This conversation explore’s Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. Mendelsohn reflects on why this endlessly retranslated text still invites fresh interpretation, describing Odysseus as a “proto-author” whose storytelling shapes reality itself.
The discussion delves into the craft of translation; balancing precision with poetic vitality, preserving the strangeness of Homeric Greek while remaining readable, and making deliberate choices about line length, diction, and even spelling.
Mendelsohn also highlights the influence of teaching and lifelong engagement with the text, emphasising close reading and the role of students in deepening understanding.
Beyond technique, the conversation explores why The Odyssey endures. its themes of homecoming, identity, storytelling, and time continue to resonate across generations, making it both an ancient epic and a strikingly modern work.
Buy The Odyssey: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-odyssey-51
Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.
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
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In this special edition, we revisit three conversations with Shakespeare and Company rare book dealer Ben Brown, originally recorded in 2022. Across these episodes, Ben guides us into the fascinating, often mysterious world of book collecting.
We begin with the basics: what makes a first edition and how collectors identify them. Ben shares insights into the thrill of the hunt and the appeal of owning a first edition. Next, we explore the extraordinary publishing history of Ulysses, from censorship battles to rare early editions, revealing how controversy shaped its legacy. Finally, we turn to signed books, unpacking why an author’s signature adds emotional and monetary value—and how provenance can transform an object into a story.
Discover our rare books collection here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/lists/rare-books
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This week Adam Biles speaks with Tash Aw about The South, his novel of inheritance, identity, and quiet upheaval. Set on a decaying farm in southern Malaysia, the story follows a family confronting generational fracture, class tension, and the uneasy weight of belonging. Aw explores how landscape is felt through the body rather than described, and how memory—fragmentary and unreliable—shapes narrative voice.
The conversation covers adolescence, queer awakening, and the tension between freedom and fear when removed from social scrutiny. Aw reflects on writing from hindsight, the interplay between personal experience and fiction, and the ways families both sustain and constrain individual identity.
Buy The South: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-south-7
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TASH AW is the author of five novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won a Whitbread Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and an O. Henry Prize, and has three times been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three 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
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An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-david-szalay
This week Adam Biles sits down with Booker Prize–winner David Szalay to discuss his novel Flesh — a work that begins in post-Soviet Hungary and expands into a stark portrait of Europe over the last three decades.
Szalay describes writing a book that takes almost nothing for granted, grounding experience in the physical body rather than psychology. They explore the novel’s emotionally charged yet morally unresolved relationships, its refusal of overt judgment, and its spare, withholding prose style.
The conversation covers masculinity, violence, agency, and the seductive fantasy of “the West,” asking whether István is passive — or simply shaped by forces larger than himself. What happens when a novel resists explanation? When language reaches its limits? And how can restraint intensify emotional impact rather than diminish it?
Buy Flesh: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/flesh-2
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Winner of the Booker Prize 2025 for Flesh. David Szalay was born in Canada, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna. He is the author of six works of fiction that have been translated into over 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut novel, London and the South-East, won Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. All That Man Is was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016.
He was selected for the 2013 edition of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2010 appeared in the Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40. In November 2025, Flesh won the Booker Prize.
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
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Recorded live in the bookshop, this conversation dives into the inventive world of Perspectives, Laurent Binet’s historical novel that transforms Renaissance Florence into the scene of a gripping whodunnit. The discussion explores how a real painter’s death becomes the catalyst for a dazzling literary experiment: a murder investigation told entirely through letters, gossip, and competing testimonies.
The author reveals how the book blends meticulous archival research with narrative play—treating history not as a fixed record but as a puzzle assembled from partial truths. From the politics of ducal courts to the working lives of artists and artisans, the episode uncovers a city in creative and ideological upheaval, grappling with what comes after artistic perfection.
At once detective story, art-history meditation, and sly reflection on storytelling itself, this is a lively exploration of how the past can feel startlingly contemporary—and how every account depends on who’s holding the pen.
Buy Perspectives: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/perspectives-4
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Laurent Binet lives and works in France. His first novel, HHhH, was an international bestseller which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, among other prizes. The 7th Function of Language won the Prix de la FNAC and Prix Interallié. Civilisations is a bestseller that has won the Grand Prix de l'Académie française.
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
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George Saunders returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with host Adam Biles about Vigil, his long-awaited new novel. Set on the threshold between life and death, Vigil follows a dying oil executive and the ghost tasked with comforting him, unfolding as a darkly comic, morally urgent meditation on guilt, responsibility, and free will in the age of climate collapse.
Saunders discusses his fascination with liminal spaces and afterlives, the technical challenges of writing beyond realism, and how revision allows fiction to think more deeply than polemic ever could. Drawing on his own past in the oil industry, he reflects on writing characters implicated in environmental harm with both empathy and moral seriousness. The conversation ranges across Dickens, Tolstoy, Buddhism, and the novel’s central question: whether redemption is possible when action is no longer an option. As ever, Saunders brings humor, generosity, and intellectual daring to a discussion that embraces complexity rather than easy answers.
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George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, and five collections of stories including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama has one of his ten favourite books of 2021). Three of Saunders’ books –Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo – were chosen for the New York Times’ list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
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
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In this wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful conversation, writer Emily LaBarge speaks with host Adam Biles about Dog Days, her groundbreaking new work of nonfiction. Rooted in the 2009 hostage event she and her family survived while on holiday in the Caribbean, the book explores not the incident itself but the psychic “mark” it left—its shape, depth, and resistance to narrative. Emily discusses the instability of storytelling after trauma, the pressure to produce coherent versions for police, insurers, or therapists, and the unsettling sense that the world itself had changed in the aftermath. She reflects on the limits of therapy, the body’s relationship to memory, and how literature, art, and cinema became “fellow travelers” in her attempt to understand the experience. Adam and Emily also consider genre, experiment, and the essay’s capacity to hold fractured thought. Dog Days emerges as a radical, erudite, and emotionally exacting exploration of what it means to live on after rupture.
Buy Dog Days: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/dog-days-13
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Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, amongst others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book.
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
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In this episode, Adam Biles welcomes Jonathan Coe to Shakespeare and Company in Paris for a rich, funny, and wide-ranging conversation about Coe’s genre-bending novel The Proof of My Innocence. What begins as a playful pastiche of a cozy crime mystery evolves into three interlocking novellas—a whodunnit, a piece of dark academia, and a fragment of autofiction—that push at the limits of storytelling itself. Coe discusses why crime fiction offers comfort in anxious times, how the destabilising politics of late 2022 (from Liz Truss to the Queen’s death) seeped into the book, and why he’s increasingly drawn to overtly fictional narratives in an age suspicious of facts. He reflects on class, Cambridge, generational politics, and the powerful role fiction plays in preserving memory. Filled with humour and insight, the conversation offers both a defence of storytelling and a portrait of Britain in flux.
Buy The Proof of My Innocence: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-proof-of-my-innocence-3
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.
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
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In this episode of the Shakespeare and Company Podcast, Adam Biles speaks with poet, translator and critic Ian Patterson about Books: A Manifesto, his passionate defence of reading in all its forms. What begins with the construction of a personal library in a converted coach house opens into a wide-ranging meditation on memory, loss, vulnerability and the profound role books play in shaping a life. Patterson discusses the anguish of parting with thousands of volumes, the intimacy of marked-up, well-lived-in books, and the politics of reading slowly in a culture addicted to speed. The conversation moves through genre snobbery, guilty pleasures, poetry’s complex rewards, the porous borders of contemporary literature, and Patterson’s experience translating the final volume of Proust—an immersion so deep it altered his own prose. It’s a warm, generous exploration of why books matter, how they remake us, and why defending them feels more urgent than ever.
Buy Books: A Manifesto: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/books-a-manifesto
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Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. The translator of Finding Time Again, the final volume of the Penguin Proust, he is also the author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo’s Almanac. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski. He worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984, had a second-hand bookselling business for ten years after that, and from 1995 until 2018 was an academic, teaching English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Many of his students have gone on to shape the world of publishing and writing, both in the UK and the US.
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
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In this live conversation at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, Adam Biles speaks with writer Ian Leslie about John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, Leslie’s acclaimed exploration of the creative and emotional bond at the heart of The Beatles. Together they trace John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s relationship from their first meeting as bereaved teenagers in Liverpool, through the crucible of Hamburg, the frenzy of Beatlemania, and the artistic revolutions of the 1960s. Leslie explains why their partnership was neither simple friendship nor sibling rivalry, but a passionate, volatile, and profoundly collaborative romance—one that shaped their music as much as their music shaped them. They discuss myth-making around the band’s breakup, why McCartney’s reputation took decades to recover, and how John and Paul remained “entangled particles” long after going their separate ways. A rich, moving conversation about genius, chemistry, and the power of creative partnership.
Buy John & Paul, A Love Story in Songs: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/john-and-paul
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lan Leslie is a journalist and author of two acclaimed books on human behaviour, Born Liars, and Curious. His first career was in advertising, where he worked as a strategist for some of the world's biggest brands at ad agencies in London and New York. He now counsels business leaders on communication and writes about psychology, technology, politics and business for the New Statesman, Economist, Guardian and the Financial Times. He is the co-host of a podcast series called Polarised, on the way we do politics today. lan is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He lives in London with his wife and two young children.
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
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In this intimate conversation recorded at Shakespeare and Company, novelist Miriam Robinson joins Adam Biles to discuss her remarkable debut, And Notre Dame Is Burning. Together, they explore the novel’s fractured structure and the emotional aftermath of betrayal, loss, and motherhood. Robinson reflects on her protagonist Esther—a woman piecing together the wreckage of a marriage through letters and fragments—as well as on grief, storytelling, and the disorientation of time. From the shadow of Notre Dame to the uncertainty of rebuilding a life, Robinson examines how women navigate love, autonomy, and the stories they tell themselves. Touching on subjects from miscarriage and memory to patriarchy and the politics of intimacy, this conversation balances literary craft with raw honesty.
Buy And Notre Dame Is Burning: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/and-notre-dame-is-burning
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Miriam Robinson is an author who has worked in the world of books and bookshops for over 15 years. Previously the host of podcast My Unlived Life, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London and her short fiction has been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize, the inaugural Pindrop/RA Short Story Prize and the Pat Kavanagh Prize. Originally from Colorado, Miriam lives in East London with her daughter and their six-toed cat Astrid.
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
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An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-miriam-toews
Trigger warning: This is a tender, funny, and hopeful conversation, that inevitably touches on the subjects of suicide and depression. Please be advised before listening.
In this moving and intimate discussion, Miriam Toews joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company to talk about her memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace. Beginning with the question “Why do I write?”, Toews embarks on a deeply personal exploration of creativity, doubt, family, and loss. She reflects on her Mennonite upbringing, the deaths of her father and sister, and the ways in which writing—and laughter—have helped her make sense of pain and love. With warmth, wit, and clarity, Toews examines the limits of narrative, the pull of silence, and the stubborn hope that persists in the face of despair. A meditation on grief, rebellion, and the meaning of home, this is a conversation about how to keep living, and how to keep creating, when life itself resists coherence.
Buy A Truce That Is Not Peace: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-truce-that-is-not-peace
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Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
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
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In this episode recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, historian and cultural critic Andrew Hussey joins Adam Biles to discuss his powerful new book, Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation. With wit, erudition, and decades of on-the-ground insight, Hussey examines how France—once the model of revolutionary ideals and republican universalism—has splintered along social, cultural, and political lines. From the banlieues to the boulevards, from secularism to identity politics, Hussey traces the fractures that now define the French experience and asks whether the nation can still live up to its promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Their conversation moves between history, journalism, and personal reflection, exploring nationalism, colonial legacies, and the uneasy relationship between Paris and the rest of the country. Fractured France is both an elegy and a challenge: can a republic built on unity survive in an age of division?
Buy Fractured France: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/fractured-france
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Andrew Hussey was Director of the Centre for Post-Colonial Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the New Statesman, and the writer/presenter of several BBC documentaries on French food and art. He is the author of The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (2001), and Paris: The Secret History (2006). He was awarded an OBE in the 2011 New Years Honours list for services to cultural relations between the United Kingdom and France. His latest book, The French Intifada, was published by Granta Books in 2014. He lives in Paris.
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.
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