They're on sale at the shop for 6 euros, and with the biannual Shakespeare and Company literary festival coming up this weekend, I expect they'll sell briskly...
Inside there's a real eclectic mix of work, from Jeanette Winterson to Luc Sante to Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Marie NDiaye and Irène Nemirovsky and Michel Houellebeq to Rivka Galchen and Jeremy Harding.
That, my friends, is a wide range.
Chatting to Sylvia Whitman, I asked her if she had a favorite piece in the issue. She said no, not really, but if she had to choose she'd opt for the Tumbleweed biographies.
"Tumbleweeds" is Shakespeare and Company slang for the writers who comes through the shop and stay a night (or a few years), sleeping amidst the books and helping out in the shop for an hour a day (and reading their required one book per day). The French police required that George Whitman take the name, passport number, and photograph of each Tumbleweed who blew through, and that is how the Tumbleweed biographies began: before long they were each asked to contribute a mini-autobiography to the collection-- a few of which have been reproduced here.
My favorite begins like this:
When my grandfather, David Rakovitze, arrived in South Africa in 1911 he bought a banana from a fruit seller. Having heard that this fruit was just one of the boundless pleasures available to him in this new land devoid of snow and pogroms, he no doubt had his hopes up. He hated that banana. Years later, my family found out why-- he had never peeled it. How must this Jewish man from Neshviz, Latvia looked? 4 feet tall, his Semitic features standing out crude against the Dutch noses, blond hair and blue eyes of the Dutch settlers of Cape Town, eating a banana with the peel on, muttering Yiddish curses of disappointment?*
...And it only gets better from there.
SO. If you can write in with your favorite story about Shakespeare and Company, I will send you a copy of the magazine. The winner will be drawn at random, because I bet all your stories are great, and I'm not going to presume to judge which one is "best." Leave your story in the comments, or email me if you don't want it to appear on the site. I'll run a selection (say, the 4 runners up?) after the festival is over.
On your marks, get set.... go!
*This particular Tumbleweed went on to become a writer. Maybe you've heard of him.
Oh I do hope to visit some day! What a great place to work!
Posted by: ugg shoes | November 09, 2010 at 07:10 AM