The Shakespeare and Company Interview
Arts:Books
Our guest this week is Brandon Taylor, whose new book The Late Americans is a stark retooling of the campus novel for the 21st century. Taking a university town in Iowa as his canvas, Taylor depicts the lives of a loose group of friends and associates: Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima—students of writing and dance—as time barrels them towards the end of their studies and the harsh realities of the so-called “real” world beyond. The novel lives in Taylor’s delicate and perceptive handling of the complicated interplay of money, class, race, art and sex—the bonds each of these can form between us and the divides they create. It is a book rich in ideas and reflections about contemporary life, contemporary America in particular, but these would all be for nothing without the meticulously wrought human comedy—in all its beauty and ugliness—at its core.
Buy The Late Americans: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-late-americans
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
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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🐖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
On Unclassifiable Books and Uncategorisable Lives, with Xiaolu Guo
How Westminster Works . . . and Why it Doesn’t, with Ian Dunt
✖️On Art, Alternative Histories, and the Arbitrariness of Life with Catherine Lacey✖️
📚How to Resist Amazon and Why, with Danny Caine📚
On Old Wounds, Finding Peace, and Returning Home, with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
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