The Shakespeare and Company Interview
Arts:Books
Like all of Xiaolu Guo’s work RADICAL is difficult to describe because it’s difficult to categorise. It might be called a memoir, but it’s form makes it unlike any memoir readers may have encountered before. It’s also a fascinating reflection on language, on literature, on memory, on vagrancy, on art, on nature and on what makes a home. But perhaps the central circle in this Venn diagram of concerns is “love”, it’s different forms, how it arrives, what it does to us, and how it fares under imposed separation.
Buy Radical here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7669745/guo-xiaolu-radical
Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include: Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time
Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1
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⛵Bidding adieu to a literary journal, with John Freeman (Feat. readings from Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Rebecca Makkai, and Mieko Kawakami read by translator Hitomi Yoshio)⛵
🛏️On Not Sleeping, with Marie Darrieussecq🛏️
🐖On Populism, Post-Truth, and Piggybacking George Orwell. Adam Biles in conversation with Rob Doyle.🐖
💎Sunday Poetry: Emilie Moorhouse reads from Emerald Wounds, her new translation of the poems of Joyce Mansour💎
🧠On Making Sense of a Murderer, with Mark O’Connell🧠
🗞️On Power, Pamphlets, Parties and Possible Worlds, with Adam Thirlwell🗞️
🪄On the KLF, Conspiracies, and Chaos with John Higgs🪄
Sunday Poetry: Nick Laird reads from Up Late
On Writing, Wormholes, and Wasted Opportunities, with Isabel Waidner
🏫On writing and translating The Topeka School, with Ben Lerner and Jakuta Alikavazovic🏫
🏇On Blood, Sweat and Racetracking, with Kathryn Scanlan🏇
BONUS: Lex Paulson on Cicero and the Future of Democracy
Hernan Diaz on his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, Trust
Proust Questionnaire: Dolly Alderton!
Leïla Slimani on Inheritance, Hippies and the Literature of Disappointment
BONUS: Martin Amis in conversation with Will Self (2010)
On Anti-Memoir, the Weird, and New Kinds of Disaster, with M. John Harrison
How Westminster Works . . . and Why it Doesn’t, with Ian Dunt
✖️On Art, Alternative Histories, and the Arbitrariness of Life with Catherine Lacey✖️
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