Bookshelves
Krista Halverson
Krista is the director of the newly founded Shakespeare and Company publishing house and the editor of the first-ever history of the bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Previously, she was the managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, a magazine of fiction and art, published by Francis Coppola and headquartered in San Francisco.
Krista’s bookshelves
Bookshelves
Crazy Sexy Cool: Contemporary Short Fiction
28th October 2015
A good short story can be like an electric, hair-raising flash of lightning, its writer revealing a sudden landscape of rich characters, complex themes, and keen observations—often in less than five thousand words. And with each new story, the writer has to pull off the trick again, conjuring ever more impressions of the world. Not for the faint of heart!!
Bookshelves
Writing from Shop Tumbleweeds & Guests
28th October 2015
Since George Whitman opened Shakespeare and Company on rue de la Bûcherie, in 1951, more than thirty thousand people from around the world have slept the night in the shop, nestled into the cozy beds found tucked among the leaning towers of books. George named these guests Tumbleweeds after the dry, rootless plants that “drift in and out on the winds of chance,” as he put it. Several past guests have gone on to have distinguished writing careers.
Bookshelves
France in the 1950s
28th October 2015
African-American writers arrived seeking escape from racial oppression back home. The Beat poets came looking for beauty and inspiration, sex and drugs. Jazz musicians took over Paris’s rue de la Huchette, women were making a new world in their own image, and the struggle for Algerian independence had begun. While the French intellectual establishment still held court at Les Deux Magots, there was a rising bohemian movement, a spirit of youth and exploration and revolt, one that would carry France from the 1950s to the cultural revolution of the late 1960s.