Shakespeare and Company

In this extraordinary memoir, neuroscientist Andrew Lees explains how William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug addict, played an unlikely part in his medical career. Lees draws on Burroughs’ search for an addiction cure to discover a ground-breaking treatment for shaking palsy, and learns how to use the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes to diagnose patients. Lees follows Burroughs into the rainforest and under the influence of yagé (ayahuasca) gains insights that encourage him to pursue new lines of pharmacological research and explore new forms of science.

Join us for an evening with one of the masters of the short story, Ann Beattie, reading from her extraordinary new collection The State We’re In.

We’re thrilled to be celebrating one of the most consistently innovative and interesting of independent publishers, CB Editions. Guests will include Will Eaves, Beverley Bie Brahic, Lara Pawson and publisher, Charles Boyle.

Our events host swaps seats for the night to read from and discuss his début novel, Feeding Time, chosen by The Observer as a Fiction Pick for 2016.

Where better than Paris to celebrate Lauren Elkin’s superb Flâneuse? Pull on your mental walking boots and prepare yourself for an intellectual stroll like no other.

Join us as we celebrate the worldwide launch of our bookstore’s very own memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of The Heart. “I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.” —George Whitman, founder Drawing on a century’s worth of never-before-seen archives, this first history of the bookstore features more than 300 images and 70 editorial contributions from shop visitors such as Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Kate Tempest, and Ethan Hawke. Edited by Krista Halverson, with a foreword by Jeanette Winterson and an epilogue by Sylvia Whitman, the 400-page book is fully illustrated with color throughout. Photographs and ephemera are woven together with personal essays, diary entries, and poems from writers including Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sylvia Beach, Nathan Englander, Dervla Murphy, Jeet Thayil, David Rakoff, Ian Rankin, Kate Tempest, and Ethan Hawke. With hundreds of images, the book features Tumbleweed autobiographies, precious historical documents, and beautiful photographs, including ones of such renowned guests as William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Langston Hughes, Alberto Moravia, Zadie Smith, Jimmy Page, and Marilynne Robinson. For almost 70 years, Shakespeare and Company has been a home-away-from-home for celebrated writers—including James Baldwin, Jorge Luis Borges, A. M. Homes, and Dave Eggers—as well as for young, aspiring authors and poets. Visitors are invited to read in the library, share a pot of tea, and sometimes even live in the shop itself, sleeping in beds tucked among the towering shelves of books. Since 1951, more than 30,000 have slept at the “rag and bone shop of the heart.”

For our first event of la rentrée join us for an evening with Garth Greenwell whose brilliant and provocative What Belongs to You has been taking the world by storm.

For our final NYU event this summer we’re delighted to welcome the extraordinary poet Robin Coste Lewis and to welcome back the inimitable Zadie Smith.

For our second NYU event of 2016 we are thrilled to welcome two of the most interesting writers at work today, Etgar Keret and Paul Muldoon.

Join us as we celebrate five decades of the wonderful Modern Poetry in Translation, with poets, Timothy Ades, David Constantine, Helen Constantine, Sasha Dugdale, Jennie Feldman, Nikola Madzirov, Caroline Maldonado and Stephen Romer.

For the first of this year’s events with our friends at NYU we are thrilled to be joined by John Freeman to launch issue 2 of his anthology, Freeman’s, along with three of its contributors, the hugely talented Valeria Luiselli, Aleksandar Hemon and Édouard Louis.

We’re thrilled to welcome 2015 Booker Prize Winner, Marlon James, to read from the magnificent A Brief History of Seven Killings. This event was made possible thanks to our friends at Marlon James’ French publisher Albin Michel.

To celebrate the launch of the summer issue of The Happy Reader we are honoured to be joined by one of the greatest living documentary filmmakers, Frederick Wiseman, in conversation with The Happy Reader's editor-in-chief Seb Emina.

Join us for an evening of radical poetry with American poet and publisher Sam Hamill and Iraqi poet, actor and playwright Salah Al-Hamdani.

We’re thrilled to be joined by one of the most interesting and innovative writers at work today, Olivia Laing, to read from and discuss her essential new work The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone.