In this rich conversation, Francesca Wade joins Adam Biles to discuss her biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. Wade explores the complexities of Stein’s life, legacy, and literary innovations, foregrounding Stein’s long-overlooked partner, Alice B. Toklas, as a powerful and persistent force behind the myth. They dive into questions of biography, erasure, performance, and gender, as well as Stein’s fraught political affiliations during WWII. Wade’s approach is both formally inventive and deepl...
Jul 03, 2025•1 hr 6 min
In this episode, Adam Biles speaks with acclaimed author Geoff Dyer live from Shakespeare and Company about his new memoir, Homework . Dyer reflects on growing up in 1960s Cheltenham, navigating family, class, and the formation of self. With characteristic wit and insight, he paints portraits of his quietly disappointed mother and parsimonious father, capturing an era that feels remote yet familiar. The conversation explores the power of memory, the weirdness of grammar schools, the ambient pres...
Jun 25, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Rebecca Solnit: Changing the Story, Changing the World In this powerful in-store conversation, Rebecca Solnit joins Adam Biles to discuss her new book No Straight Road Takes You There — a rallying call for hope, justice, and the reimagining of our collective future. With wit, clarity, and courage, Solnit explores how stories shape our world — and how changing them can change everything. Drawing on decades of activism and deep historical insight, she challenges despair, celebrates solidarity, and...
Jun 18, 2025•1 hr 5 min
In this episode of the Shakespeare and Company Podcast, Adam Biles speaks with acclaimed author Catherine Lacey about her daring new work The Möbius Book . Structured as a "Tête-bêche"—two intertwined texts printed back-to-back—the book pairs a memoir chronicling the fallout of a painful breakup with a novella that spirals into the psychological suspense of a possible murder next door. As the narratives bend and mirror each other, Lacey explores the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction...
Jun 11, 2025•54 min
Trigger Warning: This episode contains detailed discussions of child sexual abuse, rape, trauma, and the failures of the justice system. In this powerful and deeply affecting conversation, Neige Sinno speaks with Adam Biles about her landmark book Sad Tiger , recently published in English in a luminous translation by Natasha Lehrer. A searing literary interrogation of the years of abuse Sinno suffered at the hands of her stepfather, Sad Tiger explores the limits of testimony, the insufficiencies...
Jun 05, 2025•1 hr 9 min
In this rich conversation, Guadalupe Nettel joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company to explore the themes of her short story collection The Accidentals. They delve into the complexities of perception and the uncanny, the deep strangeness embedded in familial relationships, and the porous boundary between nature and human nature. Nettel discusses how her stories often begin with a striking image and unfold through a character’s voice, frequently taking shape in the liminal space between reali...
May 23, 2025•52 min
In this episode of the Shakespeare and Company Interview Podcast, Adam Biles welcomes Philip Hoare to the bookstore for a mesmerizing conversation about Hoare’s latest book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. With characteristic lyricism, Hoare explores the mystic intersections between Blake’s visionary art and poetry and the siren call of the ocean. The discussion flows through queer longing, mythic imagery, and the enduring pull of nature and art. A haunting, moving, and often playful...
May 07, 2025•57 min
In this episode, Adam Biles is joined by writer Dan Richards to talk about his new book Overnight , a deep dive into the world of the night and the people who live and work while the rest of us sleep. From ferry captains and bakers to ICU nurses, researchers, and racing drivers, Richards explores the unseen rhythms and quiet heroism of nocturnal life. The conversation touches on the origins of the book—an unexpected night stranded on a mountain with his father—and how a life-threatening experien...
Apr 23, 2025•59 min
In this episode, Adam Biles is joined in the bookshop’s writing studio by Anna Whitwham, author of Soft Tissue Damage , a raw and electrifying memoir of grief, boxing, and womanhood. Following her mother’s death, Whitwham trained and fought competitively as a boxer—an act of both healing and reckoning. She discusses how physical pain can become a language for emotional anguish, how class and family history shaped her connection to the sport, and how boxing offered a surprising community of tende...
Apr 16, 2025•46 min
In this episode recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, celebrated Danish author Solvej Balle returns to the bookshop she once called home to discuss her monumental literary project On the Calculation of Volume . The novel’s protagonist, Tara Selter, finds herself reliving November 18th—again and again—opening up a profound meditation on time, memory, isolation, and human existence. Balle reflects on the decades-long journey of crafting this work, the philosophical underpinnings of time loops,...
Apr 10, 2025•57 min
Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah sits down with Adam Biles in store to discuss his new novel, Theft . Their conversation delves into the intricate interplay between personal history and the enduring legacy of colonialism, examines the complex dynamics of family and servitude, and discusses the challenge of transcending inherited narratives. Buy Theft : https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/theft-2 * Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is th...
Mar 27, 2025•49 min
For this bonus episode, the Shakespeare and Company podcast welcomes Jeremy Pelt, renowned jazz trumpeter and author of Griot: Examining the Lives of Jazz Great Storytellers . In conversation with Alex Freiman, Pelt discusses the evolution of jazz, the influence of oral traditions, and the importance of documenting firsthand accounts from legendary musicians. Reflecting on his early days at Berklee, his experiences touring worldwide, and his deep reverence for jazz elders like Roy Haynes and Way...
Mar 19, 2025•54 min
In this episode, we’re joined by novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo to discuss her latest novel, Call Me Ishmaelle . A bold reimagining of Moby-Dick , Guo's novel audaciously swaps the gender of Melville’s narrator and plunges into a world of hidden identities, maritime adventure, and cultural collision. With host Adam Biles, Guo reflects on her personal and literary journey—from her early, abandoned encounters with Moby-Dick in Chinese to her deep dive into American whaling history and the Civil...
Mar 12, 2025•57 min
In this thought-provoking discussion, poet and oral historian Sarah Hesketh discusses her latest book, 2016 (CB Editions), a powerful exploration of one of the most pivotal years in recent history. Through a poetic and documentary approach, she captures the voices of twelve individuals reflecting on key events that shaped the world—Brexit, Trump’s election, the Syrian refugee crisis, celebrity deaths, and the climate emergency. Hesketh discusses her unique oral history-meets-poetry methodology, ...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr 2 min
In this special live recording we dive into The Seers , the mesmerising new novel by Sulaiman Addonia . In conversation with Adam Biles , Addonia shares the story behind his bold, unfiltered novel—written as a single, unbroken paragraph—through the voice of Hannah , an Eritrean refugee navigating love, loss, sexuality, and identity on the streets of London. Three powerful readings by Liya Kebede , bringing Hannah’s world vividly to life The Seers is a novel that defies definition—sensual, poetic...
Feb 11, 2025•49 min
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Amber Massie-Blomfield, author of Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create a Better World . This conversation, recorded in store, dives into the profound role art plays in times of crisis. Amber shares stories of artists who defied oppressive regimes, like Claude Cahun's surrealist resistance in Nazi-occupied Jersey and Susan Sontag’s production of Waiting for Godot during the siege of Sarajevo. We explore how art inspires activism, questio...
Jan 30, 2025•1 hr 4 min
In this pivotal episode, Adam Biles speaks with French journalist and author Salomé Saqué about her urgent new book, Résister . Recorded two days after the death of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and coinciding with Donald Trump’s second inauguration, this conversation delves into the global rise of far-right movements, their strategies, and the grave implications for democracy. Saqué discusses the normalisation of extremist politics in France, the erosion of democratic institutions, ...
Jan 20, 2025•48 min
For the second part of this year’s Bloomcast Holiday Special, Alice, Lex, and Adam get help from novelist Claire-Louise Bennett and Philosophy professor Foad Dizadji-Bahmani to explore how it challenges conventional ideas of narrative, language, and meaning. As always, our Bloomcasters invite listeners into a spirited and thought-provoking conversation that bridges literary analysis, philosophical inquiry, and personal reflections…before topping of the conversation with a game so contrived it wo...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Originally published by The Stinging Fly Press in Ireland on 2015, Claire-Louise Bennett’s POND found a wider audience with its UK publisher, the then nascent Fitzcarraldo Editions—the paradigm-shifting house that is currently celebrating its 10th birthday. POND is an extraordinarily erudite book, which wears that erudition extraordinarily lightly. It could be understood as being in dialogue with writers such as Huysmans, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, John Berger, as well as with any number of c...
Jan 08, 2025•1 hr
Happy Joycension Day! For this year’s Bloomcast Holiday Special, Alice, Lex, and Adam reunited for a lively discussion of Watt by Samuel Beckett, asking: How does Beckett’s minimalist, disintegrative style compare to James Joyce’s expansive, celebratory storytelling? What makes this novel so uniquely absurd and profound? And why does Watt feel both so playful and deeply unsettling? Is Watt a meticulously structured puzzle or an exercise in unraveling structure itself? What does Watt tell us abou...
Jan 06, 2025•58 min
The publication of The Coin by Yasmin Zaher marks the arrival of a determinedly contemporary, sometimes confounding, always compelling voice in English-language literature. Telling the story of a young Palestinian woman, struggling to make her life in New York City, we quickly get to know a woman of complexities and contradictions… She’s the heir to a vast fortune—and with the tastes that match such wealth—but is denied access to her inheritance, and is living on a meagre-ish stipend in one of t...
Dec 25, 2024•55 min
In a world overwhelmed by complex political challenges and endless commentary, where can we turn for insight into how we got here—and where we might go next? From the survival of democracy to the rise of AI, from confronting inequality to resisting surveillance, today's problems demand deep thinking. In his latest book The History of Ideas , David Runciman explores how the rich history of political thought offers fresh perspectives on contemporary issues. What can the creator of the Panopticon t...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min
Why are we so obsessed with the apocalypse? Is it a reaction to the state of the world—climate catastrophe, regional wars threatening global conflict, pandemic scares, and the unsettling rise of AI—or does it run deeper? Is it inherent to the modern world or, perhaps, the human condition? And why are we so captivated by apocalyptic stories in books, films, TV shows, video games, and art—sometimes improbable, sometimes terrifyingly possible? Dorian Lynskey explores these questions in Everything M...
Dec 11, 2024•1 hr 9 min
On the night of Friday, 13 November 2015, three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France during a football match between France and Germany, attended by President François Hollande. By 1am the next morning, 130 victims were dead, and 416 others were injured, many critically. Seven attackers were killed, and two more died in a shootout with police days later. In September 2021, nearly six years later, the trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the attacks began in a speci...
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Denis Hirson’s 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 ...
Nov 20, 2024•58 min
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 Clémentine 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 isn’t sure he’s ready for fat...
Nov 13, 2024•1 hr
Colombe Schneck’s THE PARIS TRILOGY is a book—or rather three books, first published separately in French—about growing up, about friendship, about love, about family, about class, about womanhood and the patriarchy…and 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 Lehrer—who joins the conversation— THE PARIS TRILOGY begins with SEVENTEEN, a searingly frank account of the a...
Nov 06, 2024•56 min
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 time—the past, present and the future—on Manson Family Alumnus Leslie Van Houyten, on History, on Death, on the Occult, on what it means to be “sensitive”…and 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 ...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr 9 min
This week’s guest is Aysegul Savas, whose mesmerising third novel, The Anthropologists is about a great many things. It’s about what it means to leave one’s home. It’s about attempting to lay down roots elsewhere. It’s about the mystery, banality, and all-consuming nature of love. It’s about the dynamics of friendship, and how those are stress-tested by life. It’s about growing up and growing old. It’s about how our lives are shaped by rituals…and by the lack of them. And it’s about how anxiety-...
Oct 09, 2024•56 min
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-interviews Buy The Vaster Wilds: https://www.shakespea...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 1 min
