We recently welcomed Catherine Lacey to the bookshop to discuss her vertiginous latest novel Biography of X.

Ostensibly the quest of a journalist, C.M. Lucca, to discover more about the life of her late wife—an artist who went by many names, but who she knew only as X—it quickly becomes clear that, in Biography of X, it’s not just one life being called into question, but a genre of literature, a method of reading, a manner of telling stories, a concept of history, perhaps even truth itself.

Buy Biography of X here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/biography-of-x-5

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Catherine Lacey is the author of four books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, Pew, and Biography of X. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Vogue, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is a Granta Best of Young American Novelist, a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of the 2021 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

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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Set in small-town, post-crash Ireland, The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family—Dickie, Imelda, Cass and PJ—as the fabric of their lives first frays at the edges, then begins to unravel completely. The Barnes’ are endearing, and complex, and funny, and infuriating… In short, one of the most realistic and memorable portrayals of a family you’ll find in contemporary fiction.

Throughout the book The Bee Sting’s focus masterfully expands and contracts between the minutiae of adolescent friendship, marital tensions and financial woes, and the threat of full scale global apocalypse, while touching on pretty much everything in between.

It is a book about families, how they build you up and how they knock you down, about how both the lived past and the imagined future weigh on our lives, about coincidence, about loneliness, about optimism, about love and loss, about climate change, and about shame… it’s also a book, unsurprisingly, about bees—although perhaps not in the way that you might think.

Buy The Bee Sting: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-bee-sting-3

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Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975 and is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, The Mark and the Void and The Bee Sting. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void won the Everyman Wodehouse Prize. The Bee Sting won the Nero Book of the Year Award and the An Post Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Writers’ Prize for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Paul Murray lives in Dublin.

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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A woman tells her son about his early life. About the months and years that he will by now have forgotten. When he was a baby, then a toddler, and when she was going into battle every day. For him first, and only then for herself. It’s a battle fought on many fronts. Against exhaustion, against time, against the loss of selfhood, against an increasingly absent husband, and against a society that values women less than men, and perhaps mothers least of all. And with no guarantee that she, that they, will come out on top. Between a testimony and a confession, between a lesson and a warning to the man her boy will become Soldier Sailor is devastating, uplifting, punishing, galvanising, vertiginous, infuriating, honest, raw, painful, and illuminating…in short, as close a representation of the early days of parenthood that can be committed to words.

Bu Soldier Sailor here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/soldier-sailor-2

Clare Kilroy's debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as compelling... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed. Educated at Trinity College, she lives In Dublin.

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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The biographies of several artists, all named G, form a kind of exoskeleton to Rachel Cusk’s latest novel Parade, encasing the book’s other captivating strands—the story of an unprovoked attack on a Parisian street, the story of a couple on a remote island, the story of a suicide at a museum, the story of the death of a mother. Elements which themselves are arranged into four sections—The Stuntman, The Midwife, The Diver and The Spy—that, set down beside each other, interact and converse thematically, philosophically, but also alchemically, like a kind of a very contemporary, and very Cuskian take on the Tarot. Parade is a novel that uncovers and disrupts systems of control on every scale—from systems of individual thought, to the systems of familial hegemony, to systems of societal oppression. It’s also beautifully intricate, strikingly forthright and, at times, startlingly funny. In conversation with Adam Biles.

Buy Parade: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/parade-2

Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and non-fiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow. 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-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Last week we were joined in the bookshop by Hari Kunzru, whose new novel Blue Ruin is a deeply unsettling, and intensely thought provoking reflection on the impact capital has on people, but also on art, and those who create it. It is the perfect final instalment—alongside White Tears and Red Pill—in Hari Kunzru’s own trois couleurs —a loose trilogy that has taken the temperature of our modern world, and found it to be profoundly unwell.

Buy Blue Ruin here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/blue-ruin

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HARI KUNZRU is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.

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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Last week we were joined by the wonderful Sheila Heti to celebrate the launch of her Alphabetical Diaries. In taking a decade of her journals, sorting the sentences alphabetically, then paring them down to about a tenth of their original length, Sheila Heti has freed a slice of her life from the shackles of time and in doing so has extracted some other, deeper kind of meaning from it. Alphabetical Diaries is a work that provokes vertiginous reflections on the construction of the self; that reveals how our psychological ticks and day-to-day fixations weigh heavily on our lives; that leads us to reconsider how we see, treat, judge and misjudge our friends and lovers; and that even makes us question how the book as an object works. In conversation with Adam Biles.

Buy Alphabetical Diaries: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/alphabetical-diaries-2

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Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the New Classics of the twenty-first century. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Alphabetical Diaries is her first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

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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To celebrate Dylan Thomas Day 2024 we’re delighted to share this recording of our recent event with award-winning songwriter, author and broadcaster Cerys Matthews. The evening also featured live music from Flora Hibberd and her band, including a brand new song composed for this evening. Enjoy!

More from Cerys Matthews:

Out of Chaos Comes Bliss: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/out-of-chaos-comes-bliss

Under Milk Wood: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/cerys-matthews-under-milk-wood

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cerysmatthews

More from Flora Hibberd:

Bandcamp: https://flora-hibberd.bandcamp.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/florahibberd/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FloraHibberd

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Cerys Matthews currently hosts and programmes award winning radio shows on BBC 6 music, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4; the Prix Italia and Prix Europa winning ‘Add to Playlist’.

'Where the Wild Cooks Go’ was published by Penguin- it’s an acclaimed ‘folk’ cook book which celebrates recipes, music, poetry, proverbs and history across 15 countries, and, again on Penguin, her singalong book - ‘Hook, Line and Singer’, was a Sunday Times bestseller. She’s been collecting music and poems since she was a child growing up in South Wales and received an MBE and St David award for her services to culture. Cerys was a founder member of million selling band Catatonia, is a vice-president for Shelter, president of CPRW, The Welsh Countryside Charity and patron of the Dylan Thomas Society and Ballet Cymru.

Flora Hibberd was born in London. In 2022 she signed with American label 22Twenty, and in 2023 recorded her first studio album in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with producer Shane Leonard and longtime collaborator Victor Claass. The album, 'Swirl', will be released in 2024. 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-england

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.

A few weeks ago, we welcomed Pulitzer Prizewinner Viet Thanh Nguyen to Shakespeare and Company to discuss his engrossing new work A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, a book about family, and memory, and storytelling, and history, on all the levels that it impacts upon a life.

Buy A Man of Two Faces here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/a-man-of-two-faces

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The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide

With insight, humour, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thu?t and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn M?i, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.

Resonant in its emotions and clear in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

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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

Photo by Hugo Clair Torregrosa (c) Shakespeare and Company Paris

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