The Shakespeare and Company Interview

George Saunders returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with host Adam Biles about Vigil, his long-awaited new novel. Set on the threshold between life and death, Vigil follows a dying oil executive and the ghost tasked with comforting him, unfolding as a darkly comic, morally urgent meditation on guilt, responsibility, and free will in the age of climate collapse.

Saunders discusses his fascination with liminal spaces and afterlives, the technical challenges of writing beyond realism, and how revision allows fiction to think more deeply than polemic ever could. Drawing on his own past in the oil industry, he reflects on writing characters implicated in environmental harm with both empathy and moral seriousness. The conversation ranges across Dickens, Tolstoy, Buddhism, and the novel’s central question: whether redemption is possible when action is no longer an option. As ever, Saunders brings humor, generosity, and intellectual daring to a discussion that embraces complexity rather than easy answers.

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George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, and five collections of stories including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama has one of his ten favourite books of 2021). Three of Saunders’ books –Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo – were chosen for the New York Times’ list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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In this wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful conversation, writer Emily LaBarge speaks with host Adam Biles about Dog Days, her groundbreaking new work of nonfiction. Rooted in the 2009 hostage event she and her family survived while on holiday in the Caribbean, the book explores not the incident itself but the psychic “mark” it left—its shape, depth, and resistance to narrative. Emily discusses the instability of storytelling after trauma, the pressure to produce coherent versions for police, insurers, or therapists, and the unsettling sense that the world itself had changed in the aftermath. She reflects on the limits of therapy, the body’s relationship to memory, and how literature, art, and cinema became “fellow travelers” in her attempt to understand the experience. Adam and Emily also consider genre, experiment, and the essay’s capacity to hold fractured thought. Dog Days emerges as a radical, erudite, and emotionally exacting exploration of what it means to live on after rupture.

Buy Dog Days: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/dog-days-13

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Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, amongst others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

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

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In this episode, Adam Biles welcomes Jonathan Coe to Shakespeare and Company in Paris for a rich, funny, and wide-ranging conversation about Coe’s genre-bending novel The Proof of My Innocence. What begins as a playful pastiche of a cozy crime mystery evolves into three interlocking novellas—a whodunnit, a piece of dark academia, and a fragment of autofiction—that push at the limits of storytelling itself. Coe discusses why crime fiction offers comfort in anxious times, how the destabilising politics of late 2022 (from Liz Truss to the Queen’s death) seeped into the book, and why he’s increasingly drawn to overtly fictional narratives in an age suspicious of facts. He reflects on class, Cambridge, generational politics, and the powerful role fiction plays in preserving memory. Filled with humour and insight, the conversation offers both a defence of storytelling and a portrait of Britain in flux.

Buy The Proof of My Innocence: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-proof-of-my-innocence-3

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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In this episode of the Shakespeare and Company Podcast, Adam Biles speaks with poet, translator and critic Ian Patterson about Books: A Manifesto, his passionate defence of reading in all its forms. What begins with the construction of a personal library in a converted coach house opens into a wide-ranging meditation on memory, loss, vulnerability and the profound role books play in shaping a life. Patterson discusses the anguish of parting with thousands of volumes, the intimacy of marked-up, well-lived-in books, and the politics of reading slowly in a culture addicted to speed. The conversation moves through genre snobbery, guilty pleasures, poetry’s complex rewards, the porous borders of contemporary literature, and Patterson’s experience translating the final volume of Proust—an immersion so deep it altered his own prose. It’s a warm, generous exploration of why books matter, how they remake us, and why defending them feels more urgent than ever.

Buy Books: A Manifesto: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/books-a-manifesto

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Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. The translator of Finding Time Again, the final volume of the Penguin Proust, he is also the author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo’s Almanac. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski. He worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984, had a second-hand bookselling business for ten years after that, and from 1995 until 2018 was an academic, teaching English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Many of his students have gone on to shape the world of publishing and writing, both in the UK and the US.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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In this live conversation at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, Adam Biles speaks with writer Ian Leslie about John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, Leslie’s acclaimed exploration of the creative and emotional bond at the heart of The Beatles. Together they trace John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s relationship from their first meeting as bereaved teenagers in Liverpool, through the crucible of Hamburg, the frenzy of Beatlemania, and the artistic revolutions of the 1960s. Leslie explains why their partnership was neither simple friendship nor sibling rivalry, but a passionate, volatile, and profoundly collaborative romance—one that shaped their music as much as their music shaped them. They discuss myth-making around the band’s breakup, why McCartney’s reputation took decades to recover, and how John and Paul remained “entangled particles” long after going their separate ways. A rich, moving conversation about genius, chemistry, and the power of creative partnership.

Buy John & Paul, A Love Story in Songs: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/john-and-paul

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lan Leslie is a journalist and author of two acclaimed books on human behaviour, Born Liars, and Curious. His first career was in advertising, where he worked as a strategist for some of the world's biggest brands at ad agencies in London and New York. He now counsels business leaders on communication and writes about psychology, technology, politics and business for the New Statesman, Economist, Guardian and the Financial Times. He is the co-host of a podcast series called Polarised, on the way we do politics today. lan is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He lives in London with his wife and two young children.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

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.