City Lights and Shakespeare and Company celebrate the publication of
The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews
Edited by Adam Biles
Published by Canongate Books
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 novelist and literary director Adam Biles have hosted 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.
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.
Sylvia Whitman is the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France, the celebrated bohemian English language bookstore known for welcoming readers and writers from around the world. She is the daughter of the shop’s founder, George Whitman (1913-2011).
Peter Maravelis is the Events Director at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.