The Shakespeare and Company Interview
Arts:Books
Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel The Hero of this Book is the profound and poignant account of one writer’s attempt to convey something of the irrepressible, indomitable, indefatigable, almost indescribable character of her recently deceased mother on the page. Although the narrator repeatedly stresses that this is a novel, and not a memoir, that’s to say neither a memoir by McCracken nor a memoir by the narrator…although what exactly the difference is between each of the two forms, and how each lends itself to the task at hand, is also an important interrogation of this extraordinary and tender book.
Buy The Hero of this Book: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7384323/mccracken-elizabeth-the-hero-of-this-book
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Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award), The Souvenir Museum and The Hero of This Book. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta's 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.
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🛏️
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💎Sunday Poetry: Emilie Moorhouse reads from Emerald Wounds, her new translation of the poems of Joyce Mansour💎
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🪄On the KLF, Conspiracies, and Chaos with John Higgs🪄
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On Writing, Wormholes, and Wasted Opportunities, with Isabel Waidner
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