In the debut episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist and performer Taìno Mendez to discuss Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke, the twentieth title in the Faber Editions imprint.

Published in 1965 and long out of print, the novel follows Oliver, a Black teenager spending a final summer before college in the eccentric Michigan household of his wealthy patron Etta Klein and his aunt Harriet. Witty, camp, and shot through with tragedy, it defies easy categorisation; a drawing-room satire, a coming-of-age story, and a quietly radical work of civil rights era fiction.

The conversation covers the novel's Wildean wit, its oblique engagement with race and queerness, the role of photographer Carl Van Vechten in the Harlem Renaissance, and what it means to write against expectation.

Buy Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes

UK: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571391783-ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editions/

Rest of World: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editions

Buy Rainbow Milk: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/rainbow-milk

Sign up to Faber’s Heritage Subscription, featuring all Faber Editions titles: Subscribers get a book in the post each month for just £9 alongside a curated email with exclusive extra content about the book and its author.

https://tr.ee/DsDYp5

Books & Authors Discussed

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze — William Saroyan (foreword by Stephen Fry)

Mrs Caliban — Rachel Ingalls

Palace of the Peacock — Wilson Harris

Omeros — Derek Walcott

The Flower Beneath the Foot — Ronald Firbank

Sorrow in Sunlight (retitled Prancing N-) — Ronald Firbank

Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin

Another Country — James Baldwin

À rebours (Against Nature) — Joris-Karl Huysmans

En rade (Stranded) — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Checkout 19 — Claire-Louise Bennett

Rainbow Milk — Taìno Mendez

Ulysses — James Joyce

Works by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch also mentioned

Illusions— Ruth Lehmann (upcoming Faber Editions title, discussed with Megan Nolan on our next podcast episode)

Films/TV Shows Discussed

Get Out — dir. Jordan Peele

Lovers Rock — dir. Steve McQueen

The Defiant Ones — starring Sidney Poitier

Playtime — dir. Jacques Tati

Severance

Bios

Taíno Mendez is a novelist based in the southern English town of Margate. Their first novel, Rainbow Milk, was an Observer Top Ten Best Debuts choice for 2020 and widely named as one of the best novels of the year, being shortlisted for a British Book Award and for the Jhalak Prize, Polari Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. Their non-fiction has been published in a variety of outlets including the WritersMosaic, the London Review of Books, Esquire, the Guardian and British Vogue. They are currently working on their second novel.

Ella Griffiths is Faber's Head of Classics & Heritage

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company

Listen to Alex Freiman

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3dbKbpFyqPbklwEdeLYYZR?si=Q5vy9KkRTrqf1BqU1v33cg

Insta : @alex.guitarfreiman

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philosopher and author Lea Ypi joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company Paris to discuss her latest book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, an extraordinary work blending biography, history, and fiction. When a photo of her grandparents' 1941 honeymoon went viral in Albania, sparking online abuse, Ypi found herself compelled to investigate her grandmother Leman's life in full. The search took her into the Albanian Secret Service archives, back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and deep into questions of memory, belonging, and what it means to preserve dignity in a world that conspires against it. Ypi discusses the dual narrative voices of the book, the "silence of the archives," the ethics of fictionalising real lives, and how writing as a novelist rather than a philosopher transformed her understanding of her subject. A conversation about history, imagination, and the moral necessity of hope.

Buy Indignity: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/indignity-2

*

Lea Ypi holds the Ralph Miliband Chair in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Biography Award. It is translated into over thirty 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-arundhati-roy

Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, Adam Biles sits down with Arundhati Roy to discuss her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy reflects on writing a “novelist’s memoir,” where memory and imagination blur, and explores her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. The conversation moves from Roy’s unconventional childhood in Kerala to her formative years in architecture, activism, and the aftermath of The God of Small Things. She discusses resisting literary celebrity, embracing political responsibility, and finding strength in chosen families and friendship networks. With candour and wit, Roy rejects reductive “therapy narratives,” instead offering a portrait of identity shaped by contradiction, resilience, and love.

Buy Mother Mary Comes to Me: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/mother-mary-comes-to-me

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of non-fiction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and The Architecture of Modern Empire.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.