The Shakespeare and Company Interview
Arts:Books
For the Valentine’s week episode of our podcast, we were joined by Xiaolu Guo to discuss her intense, fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, A Lover’s Discourse.
Buy A Lover’s Discourse here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781529112481/a-lovers-discourse
Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore
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A Chinese woman comes to post-Brexit London to start over - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch.
Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build their future together.
Playing with language and the cultural differences that our narrator encounters as she settles into her new life, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.
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Xiaolu Guo was born in south China. She studied at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before moving to London in 2002. Her books include Village of Stone which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and I Am China which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the Jhalak Prize and the Rathbones Folio Award 2018, and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.
In 2013 Xiaolu was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She has directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese, and documentaries about China and Britain. She was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2019, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/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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☕Proust Questionnaire: Holly McNish & Michael Pedersen☕
BLOOMCAST | HOLIDAY SPECIAL | THE DEAD
😱On Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed, with Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Adam Thirlwell😱
👭🏼Naomi Klein on Doppelgangers, Conspiracy Theories, and the Shadowlands we all inhabit…👭🏼
Claire-Louise Bennett on Nightflowers, her immersive installation at Museum of Literature Ireland
🥘On Eating through the Endtimes, with C Pam Zhang🥘
🐕On Life, Art and the Line Between the Two, with Jo Ann Beard🐕
👁️Sandra Newman on Julia, her re-imagining of George Orwell’s 1984 👁️
⛵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
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