The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews

by Adam Biles, Adam Biles (Editor), Sylvia Whitman (Introduction)

Overview

Shakespeare and Company, Paris, is one of the world’s most iconic and beautiful bookshops. Located on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame, it’s long been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers.

In that tradition, determined for the bookshop to remain a place of meaningful and transformative conversation, owner Sylvia Whitman and later novelist and literary director Adam Biles have conducted several hundred interviews with writers, ranging from prize-winning novelists to visionary non-fiction writers.

The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews is a selection of the best of these interviews from the last decade. Packed with warmth, sensitivity and humour, it’s a celebration of the greatest writers of our age and an insight into the lives and thoughts behind some of today’s most talked-about books.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781805300038
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.45(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, from where he hosts their weekly podcast, and where he curated the podcast series Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press and was a book of the year for the Observer and Irish Times. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel Beasts of England, an anarchic sequel to Orwell's Animal Farm, will be published by Galley Beggar Press next year.

Editorial Reviews

09/04/2023

In this revealing compendium, Biles (Feeding Time), literary director of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, compiles public conversations he’s conducted with authors at the store over the past decade. Annie Ernaux, George Saunders, Jesmyn Ward, and others weigh in on such topics as “questions of representation,” “the relevance of the novel as a form,” and “getting into the minds of characters.” Several writers discuss the inspiration for their novels, with Leïla Slimani describing how Lullaby, in which a French nanny kills two children in her care, drew on the sometimes pained relationship she had with her own nanny growing up. Other authors weigh in on their process, as when Marlon James reveals that A Brief History of Seven Killings started as a short crime novel that he rewrote around a different protagonist before realizing the two drafts could be integrated into a “multi-person narrative.” Though most of the contributors are fiction writers, Biles also includes conversations with theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, who muses on the subjectivity of time, and journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge, who laments the omission of Black British civil rights activism from the country’s history curricula. Biles is a skilled interviewer, soliciting reflections that shed light on how successful authors approach their craft and think about the world. The result is an illuminating glimpse inside the minds of writers. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A collection of talks with an impressive range of writers that celebrates its heritage as a focus of cultural conversation . . . Thanks to this collection, you can settle into a corner of Shakespeare and Company even if you can't make it to Paris"

Harper's Bazaar

"This handsome hardback comprises a series of interviews with authors that took place on the shopfloor over the past decade or so"

Times Literary Supplement

"A tantalising glimpse into the thoughts of some of our most vital writers . . . This is a refreshing approach to a text that, in other hands, could have felt stuffy and inaccessible"

Arts Desk