Shakespeare and Company by Krista Halverson (.PDF)
File Size: 31.2 MB
Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart by Krista Halverson
Requirements: .PDF reader, 31.2MB
Overview: A copiously illustrated account of the famed Paris bookstore.
This first-ever history of the legendary bohemian bookstore in Paris interweaves essays and poetry from dozens of writers associated with the shop, like Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin, Ethan Hawke, Robert Stone and Jeanette Winterson, among others, with hundreds of never-before-seen archival pieces, including photographs of James Baldwin, William Burroughs and Langston Hughes, plus a foreword by the celebrated British novelist Jeanette Winterson and an epilogue by Sylvia Whitman, the daughter of the store’s founder, George Whitman. The book has been edited by Krista Halverson, director of the Shakespeare and Company publishing house.
George Whitman opened his bookstore in a tumbledown 16th-century building just across the Seine from Notre-Dame in 1951, a decade after the original Shakespeare and Company had closed. Run by Sylvia Beach, it had been the meeting place for the Lost Generation and the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Since Whitman picked up the mantle, Shakespeare and Company has served as a home away from home for many celebrated writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Ray Bradbury, A.M. Homes to Dave Eggers, as well as for young authors and poets. Visitors are invited not only to read the books in the library and to share a pot of tea, but sometimes also to live in the bookstore itself, all for free. This book also includes an illustrated adaptation of Sylvia Beach’s memoir.
More than 30,000 people have stayed at Shakespeare and Company, fulfilling Whitman’s vision of a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.” Through the prism of the shop’s history, the book traces the lives of literary expats in Paris from 1951 to the present, touching on the Beat Generation, civil rights, May 1968 and the feminist movement, all while pondering that perennial literary question, “What is it about writers and Paris?”
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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