@Shakespeare_Co Podcast, December 2, 2022: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Special Podcast! To celebrate our exclusive S&Co edition of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Adam is joined by Krista Halverson, S&Co Publishing Director, and artist @neiljgower to discuss this classic of French literature.
Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover.
One man, many lives.
Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.
A “marvelous” (Lauren Groff) and “gentle, mysterious and profoundâ (Marina AbramoviÄ)Â novel about a woman who has come undone.
A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.
In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner cafĂŠ, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art – which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes’s disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.
What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.
White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.
Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel MATRIX (September 2021). Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indiesâ Choice Award, and Franceâs Grand Prix de lâHĂŠroĂŻne, was a three time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize.
She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Grantaâs Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Paris, France’s capital, is a major European city and a global center for art, fashion, gastronomy and culture. Its 19th-century cityscape is crisscrossed by wide boulevards and the River Seine. Beyond such landmarks as the Eiffel Tower and the 12th-century, Gothic Notre-Dame cathedral, the city is known for its cafe culture and designer boutiques along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-HonorĂŠ.
Video timeline: 00:00â Introduction 00:35â Shakespeare and Company Bookstore 01:25â Wallace fountains 02:14â Oldest bridge in the City 03:15â Pont des Arts 04:00â Notre Dame 05:27â Louvre Museum 06:08â Eiffel Tower 06:53â Montmartre 07:40â Wall of Love
Gertrude Stein. James Joyce. Ernest Hemingway. AimÊ CÊsaire. Simone de Beauvoir. Jacques Lacan. Walter Benjamin.
What do these writers have in common? They were all members of the Shakespeare and Company lending library.
In 1919, an American woman named Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop and lending library in Paris. Almost immediately, it became the home away from home for a community of expatriate writers and artists now known as the Lost Generation. In 1922, she published James Joyceâs Ulysses under the Shakespeare and Company imprint, a feat that made herâand her bookshop and lending libraryâfamous around the world. In the 1930s, she increasingly catered to French intellectuals, supplying English-language publications from the recently rediscovered Moby Dick to the latest issues of The New Yorker. In 1941, she preemptively closed Shakespeare and Company after refusing to sell her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer.
The Shakespeare and Company Project uses sources from the Beach Papers at Princeton University to reveal what the lending library members read and where they lived. The Project is a work-in-progress, but you can begin to explore now. Search and browse the lending library members and books. Read about joining the lending library. Download a preliminary export of Project data. In the coming months, check back for new features and essays.
From a Shakespeare and Company email:
Dear Sylvia Beach,
One hundred years ago this month, you opened the shutters of a small bookshop on rue Dupuytren. Its name was Shakespeare and Company. I often wonder if, on that first morning, you could ever have imagined how important your story would be.
You were only 32 but had already lived quite a life. Soulful and fearless, witty and energetic, youâd been active in the womenâs suffrage movement, studied French poetry in Paris, and served with the Red Cross in Serbia during the First World War. You had also met Adrienne Monnier, one of the first women in France to found her own bookshop. Adrienne would be your companion for decades to come.
Your bookshopâfirst on rue Dupuytren, then around the corner on rue de lâOdĂŠonâbecame a sanctuary for Anglophone and Francophone writers. T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as AndrĂŠ Gide, Paul ValĂŠry, and Louis Aragon, among many others, all bought and borrowed books from you, and attended readings and parties at Shakespeare and Company. As AndrĂŠ Chamson wrote about you: âSylvia Beach carried pollen like a bee. She cross-fertilised these writers. She did more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined.â I think of this whenever I ponder the role booksellers and bookshops can play during this age of political and ecological turbulence. When James Joyce couldnât find anyone to publish Ulyssesâhis modernist masterpiece that had been condemned for obscenityâyou stepped up. Even when you closed your bookshop in 1941, it was not an act of defeat but of defianceâyou would rather see your lifeâs work shuttered forever than sell Finnegans Wake to a high-ranking Nazi officer.
When my father, George Whitman, opened this bookshop in 1951, you were not just a regular visitor but an inspiration. You had shown how a true bookseller must also be prepared to be a librarian, a publisher, a PO box, a banker, a hotelier, andâmost importantlyâa friend to writers and readers. For your belief that a love of reading is more important than the quest for profit, you have been called the patron saint of independent bookstores. Weâre sure that your extraordinary memoir and your beautiful letters continue to embolden booksellers the world over, just as they embolden us. Particularly during hard times, your story stands like a beacon when we need direction, comfort, or inspiration.
Thank you, Sylvia, for everything you did and everything you stood for.
In loving homage,
Sylvia Whitman
Proprietor
Shakespeare And Company
https://shakespeareandcompany.com/
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