It’s here! Shakespeare and Company’s newly relaunched literary magazine, dubbed by founder George Whitman “The Poor Man’s Paris Review,” has just arrived at the shop. I picked up my copy last night and it is gorgeous– chic and sexy and all the things you’d want a newly-relaunched literary magazine to be.

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.

>click here to win a free copy