Shakespeare and Company

Join us for our first ever coffee morning in our new café. We are delighted to welcome Darragh McKeon. Born in 1979, Darragh grew up in the midlands of Ireland. He has worked as a theater director and lives in New York. His first novel All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a gripping end-of-empire novel, charting the collapse of the Soviet Union through the focal point of the Chernobyl disaster. This event has been organised in association with Darragh's French publisher, Belfond.

We’re excited to welcome French writer Jean-Philippe Blondel to read from the English translation of his bestselling novel The 6:41 to Paris.

Join writer and critic Luc Sante as he takes us on a vivid journey across the seamy underside of Paris, and discover how the working and criminal classes shaped the city over the past two centuries.

Join us as we kick off our 2016 events programme with a stunning line-up of writers, here to celebrate the launch of Freeman's, a new journal of the best new writing. Hosted by NYU and John Freeman the event will feature contributions from Aleksandar Hemon, Ishion Hutchinson, Etgar Keret and Kamila Shamsie.

We are very excited to welcome actor and author Ethan Hawke to read from his beautiful new book Rules for a Knight. All swords to be checked in at the door!

Join audience favourite John Baxter as he regales us with memories of yuletide dinners past from A Paris Christmas. A delicious seasonal treat!

In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, her most provocative and optimistic book yet, Naomi Klein has upended the debate about the stormy era already upon us, exposing the myths that are clouding the climate debate. You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it's impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it - it just requires breaking every rule in the "free-market" playbook. You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring. It's about changing the world, before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap - or we sink. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate is a book that will redefine our era.

Join The Happy Reader and Penguin Books for the launch of issue 5, the 2015 winter issue. This season the magazine is caught up in a fascination with department stores in general, and the magic of Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames in particular. This festive salon will feature readings from actress Lola Peploe as well as The Happy Reader’s editor Seb Emina and some of the magazine’s other contributors. There may also be a few surprises along the way…

As all eyes turn to Paris for the COP21 Climate Conference, we’re excited to introduce journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian speaking about her new book The Cosmopolites - The Coming of the Global Citizen.

We're delighted to welcome Joanna Walsh, who will be discussing her two recently published titles, Hotel (Bloomsbury) and Vertigo (Dorothy Project). This event will be chaired by writer and critic Lauren Elkin.

Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker’s generous selections in A Stranger’s Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp. In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafés, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations, and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype—perhaps with gunfire in the background. A Stranger’s Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world—far off or up close as the morning’s first cup of tea. Marilyn Hacker is the recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her collection Winter Numbers received a Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Paris, France. A Stranger’s Mirror was longlisted for the National Book Award. Poet and dance producer/curator, Karthika Naïr was born in Kerala and lives in Paris. Naïr is the author of Bearings (HarperCollins India, 2009), a poetry collection and The Honey Hunter/Le Tigre de Miel (Young Zubaan, India/Editions Hélium, France, 2013), a children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. She was also the principal scriptwriter of DESH, choreographer Akram Khan’s award-winning dance production. In Karthika Naïr’s résumé as an enabler, one finds mention of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Damien Jalet, Käfig/Mourad Merzouki, two Olivier awards, Auditorium Musica per Roma, the Louvre, the Shaolin Temple, misadventures with ninja swords and pachyderms, among others, many of which make their way willy-nilly into her poetry (though, hopefully, not into this retelling of the Mahabharata)."

Jeanette Winterson on The Gap of Time by

Writing the City: Jon Day, Lara Feigel, and Lauren Elkin by

Ben Aitken on Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island by

Anthony Sattin on A Winter on the Nile by