Share
The Shakespeare and Company Interview
đ¸đ¤ľââď¸The Beatles, James Bond and the British Psyche ,with John Higgsđ¤ľââď¸đ¸
â˘
**Contains outrageous spoilers about the recent Bond film No Time to Die**
There are few cultural phenomena that rival the impact, reach and longevity of either The Beatles or James Bond. That both made their first significant impact on the public consciousness on the same day 5 October 1962 â with the release of the Beatlesâ first record âLove Me Doâ and Dr. No the first James Bond film â was a significant enough piece of synchronicity for John Higgs to begin an investigation into the decades-long dance between two very different visions of the world, of Britain, of masculinity of art, of love and â inevitably â of death.
Buy Love and Let Die here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6267356/higgs-john-love-and-let-die
*
SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODES
Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses
If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.
Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en
All money raised goes to supporting âFriends of Shakespeare and Companyâ the bookshopâs non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activitiesâfrom the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.
*
John Higgs is a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives, hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, which can change the way we see the world. In the words of MOJO magazine, âReading John Higgs is like being shot with a diamond. Suddenly everything becomes terrifyingly clearâ. The Times agreed, saying that âHiggsâs prose has a diamond-hard quality. He knows how to make us relate.â âA while ago I decided to read anything Higgs writes,â said Frank Cottrell Boyce, âHe seems to be able to take any subject â pop music, Watling Street, conspiracy theories, robotics â and poke at it until it yields up its secrets.â Russell Brand described him succinctly as âa great writer [âŚ] who pulls shit together in an interesting way.â
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freimanâs Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
More episodes
View all episodes
Denis Hirson: âThey Called My Father A One-Man Revolutionâ
57:41|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 recoveryâŚif 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*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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
BONUS: Lauren Elkin on Scaffolding (in conversation with Amanda Dennis)
59:56|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 ClĂŠmentine 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.*Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Flâneuse: 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
Colombe Schneck on The Paris Trilogy (with Translator Natasha Lehrer)
55:35|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 patriarchyâŚand 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*Colombe Schneck is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, she has received prizes from the AcadĂŠmie 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 UniversitĂŠ 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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Lynne Tillman on American History, Human Absurdity, and why Trump should have become a Comedian
01:09:23|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 âsensitiveââŚand 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.âBuy American Genius, A Comedy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/american-genius*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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
AyĹegĂźl SavaĹ on Love, Rootlessness, and âThe Age of Poetryâ
56:12|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 ritualsâŚand 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*AysegĂźl 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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
On the State of the (Book)World, with Lauren Groff and Neel Mukherjee (live in Edinburgh)
01:01:11|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-interviewsBuy The Vaster Wilds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-vaster-wilds-3Buy Choice: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/choice-2*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 andFuries, 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 lâHĂŠroĂŻne, 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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Rachel Kushner on Creation Lake (Booker Prize SHORTLIST 2024)
55:28|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 CĂŠline, 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*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 MĂŠdicis 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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Ferdia Lennon on Glorious Exploits
42:04|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*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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Roxy Dunn on As Young As This
37:35|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 womanhoodâBuy As Young As This: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/as-young-as-this*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-englandListen to Alex Freimanâs latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w