The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Why Translate Homer Again? Daniel Mendelsohn on his new Odyssey

This conversation explore’s Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. Mendelsohn reflects on why this endlessly retranslated text still invites fresh interpretation, describing Odysseus as a “proto-author” whose storytelling shapes reality itself.

The discussion delves into the craft of translation; balancing precision with poetic vitality, preserving the strangeness of Homeric Greek while remaining readable, and making deliberate choices about line length, diction, and even spelling.

Mendelsohn also highlights the influence of teaching and lifelong engagement with the text, emphasising close reading and the role of students in deepening understanding.

Beyond technique, the conversation explores why The Odyssey endures. its themes of homecoming, identity, storytelling, and time continue to resonate across generations, making it both an ancient epic and a strikingly modern work.

Buy The Odyssey: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-odyssey-51

Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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In this special edition, we revisit three conversations with Shakespeare and Company rare book dealer Ben Brown, originally recorded in 2022. Across these episodes, Ben guides us into the fascinating, often mysterious world of book collecting.

We begin with the basics: what makes a first edition and how collectors identify them. Ben shares insights into the thrill of the hunt and the appeal of owning a first edition. Next, we explore the extraordinary publishing history of Ulysses, from censorship battles to rare early editions, revealing how controversy shaped its legacy. Finally, we turn to signed books, unpacking why an author’s signature adds emotional and monetary value—and how provenance can transform an object into a story.

Discover our rare books collection here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/lists/rare-books
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This week Adam Biles speaks with Tash Aw about The South, his novel of inheritance, identity, and quiet upheaval. Set on a decaying farm in southern Malaysia, the story follows a family confronting generational fracture, class tension, and the uneasy weight of belonging. Aw explores how landscape is felt through the body rather than described, and how memory—fragmentary and unreliable—shapes narrative voice.

The conversation covers adolescence, queer awakening, and the tension between freedom and fear when removed from social scrutiny. Aw reflects on writing from hindsight, the interplay between personal experience and fiction, and the ways families both sustain and constrain individual identity.

Buy The South: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-south-7

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TASH AW is the author of five novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won a Whitbread Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and an O. Henry Prize, and has three times been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three languages.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-david-szalay

This week Adam Biles sits down with Booker Prize–winner David Szalay to discuss his novel Flesh — a work that begins in post-Soviet Hungary and expands into a stark portrait of Europe over the last three decades.

Szalay describes writing a book that takes almost nothing for granted, grounding experience in the physical body rather than psychology. They explore the novel’s emotionally charged yet morally unresolved relationships, its refusal of overt judgment, and its spare, withholding prose style.

The conversation covers masculinity, violence, agency, and the seductive fantasy of “the West,” asking whether István is passive — or simply shaped by forces larger than himself. What happens when a novel resists explanation? When language reaches its limits? And how can restraint intensify emotional impact rather than diminish it?

Buy Flesh: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/flesh-2

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Winner of the Booker Prize 2025 for Flesh. David Szalay was born in Canada, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna. He is the author of six works of fiction that have been translated into over 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut novel, London and the South-East, won Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. All That Man Is was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016.

He was selected for the 2013 edition of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2010 appeared in the Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40. In November 2025, Flesh won the Booker Prize.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded live in the bookshop, this conversation dives into the inventive world of Perspectives, Laurent Binet’s historical novel that transforms Renaissance Florence into the scene of a gripping whodunnit. The discussion explores how a real painter’s death becomes the catalyst for a dazzling literary experiment: a murder investigation told entirely through letters, gossip, and competing testimonies.

The author reveals how the book blends meticulous archival research with narrative play—treating history not as a fixed record but as a puzzle assembled from partial truths. From the politics of ducal courts to the working lives of artists and artisans, the episode uncovers a city in creative and ideological upheaval, grappling with what comes after artistic perfection.

At once detective story, art-history meditation, and sly reflection on storytelling itself, this is a lively exploration of how the past can feel startlingly contemporary—and how every account depends on who’s holding the pen.

Buy Perspectives: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/perspectives-4

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Laurent Binet lives and works in France. His first novel, HHhH, was an international bestseller which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, among other prizes. The 7th Function of Language won the Prix de la FNAC and Prix Interallié. Civilisations is a bestseller that has won the Grand Prix de l'Académie française.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.