Liam Callanan's Blog, page 3
June 20, 2017
Of Bloomsday & Birthdays
Apologies for being away from Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ for a spell; I'm glad to be back. I'm counting down to the publication of my new novel, Paris by the Book (April 2018, from Dutton) by tweeting a new Paris book rec each Tuesday. Many, but not all, went into the mix of research that fed my new book.
I've been doing this for a few weeks now with the hashtag #parisbythebook and as fun as it's been, it's also been maddening to try to collapse my thoughts about each book into 140 characters. So I'm glad to have slightly more space than that to celebrate my rec this week, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company.
It's a lovely, short memoir, as humble and self-effacing as its author.
Shakespeare & Co., of course, is the famed English language Paris bookstore -- or rather, it was the famed English language bookstore in Paris until the Nazis shut it down in World War II (due to an officer's annoyance that Beach wouldn't sell him her last copy of Finnegans Wake.
Beach's connection to Joyce began almost 20 years earlier, when she published his Ulysses, a mammoth challenge made even more so by Joyce's incessant editing, even after the book had been typeset. (It's something I've been thinking about a lot as I review my new novel's typeset pages -- I've been warned I can change no more than 10 percent at this stage!)
Shakespeare & Company does live on in Paris today, but in a new iteration in a new location, launched by famed bookseller George Whitman, who renamed his store --and daughter -- to honor Sylvia and her beacon on the Left Bank. When people ask why independent bookstores matter, I think of a lot of a stores and people and places -- but I think first of all of Shakespeare & Company and Sylvia Beach. It's a helpful reminder that of all the things a bookseller has to be -- patient, smart, perceptive, well-read -- one of the little mentioned attributes has been historically the most important: brave.
Visit Shakespeare & Company today just south of Notre Dame on the rue de la Bûcherie, or in the pages of their beautiful book.
PS And the birthday wishes are for Paul Muldoon, whose birthday is reportedly today. Some talented students of mine once animated his poem, "Hedgehog" (and then bought one):
I've been doing this for a few weeks now with the hashtag #parisbythebook and as fun as it's been, it's also been maddening to try to collapse my thoughts about each book into 140 characters. So I'm glad to have slightly more space than that to celebrate my rec this week, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company.
It's a lovely, short memoir, as humble and self-effacing as its author. Shakespeare & Co., of course, is the famed English language Paris bookstore -- or rather, it was the famed English language bookstore in Paris until the Nazis shut it down in World War II (due to an officer's annoyance that Beach wouldn't sell him her last copy of Finnegans Wake.
Beach's connection to Joyce began almost 20 years earlier, when she published his Ulysses, a mammoth challenge made even more so by Joyce's incessant editing, even after the book had been typeset. (It's something I've been thinking about a lot as I review my new novel's typeset pages -- I've been warned I can change no more than 10 percent at this stage!)
Shakespeare & Company does live on in Paris today, but in a new iteration in a new location, launched by famed bookseller George Whitman, who renamed his store --and daughter -- to honor Sylvia and her beacon on the Left Bank. When people ask why independent bookstores matter, I think of a lot of a stores and people and places -- but I think first of all of Shakespeare & Company and Sylvia Beach. It's a helpful reminder that of all the things a bookseller has to be -- patient, smart, perceptive, well-read -- one of the little mentioned attributes has been historically the most important: brave.
Visit Shakespeare & Company today just south of Notre Dame on the rue de la Bûcherie, or in the pages of their beautiful book.
PS And the birthday wishes are for Paul Muldoon, whose birthday is reportedly today. Some talented students of mine once animated his poem, "Hedgehog" (and then bought one):
