Michael Moorcock at Shakespeare and Co

Monday 5th November 7pm at Shakespeare and Company.

Where Michael Moorcock fits into the history of British literature depends on when the historian is writing. During the 1950s, he'd figure as the precocious editor of TARZAN ADVENTURES and the SEXTON BLAKE mystery novels. A decade later, you'd find him mentioned for BEHOLD THE MAN, about a time traveller seeking Jesus, and as prolific creator of prototypical fantasy hero Elric of Melnibone, though another account would cite novels like THE FINAL PROGRAMME, and their sexually ambiguous messiah figure Jerry Cornelius.

In 1964, Moorcock took over NEW WORLDS, Britain's only remaining science fiction magazine, and gleefully inoculated it with the virus of the counterculture. A generation of experimental futurist writers, including J.G. Ballard, Norman Spinrad and Thomas Disch, surfed to fame on the resulting New Wave. Fronting his own band Deep Fix, Moorcock also performed and wrote for rock groups Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult, and survived Hollywood exile as a screenwriter, only to re-emerge in the 1980s with Whitbread-shortlisted MOTHER LONDON, a vast, sprawling, eccentric masterful comic novel [which] seems to encapsulate the history of postwar Britain in its dizzy decline....(Publishers Weekly), and the Colonel Pyat books, including BYZANTIUM ENDURES and THE VENGEANCE OF ROME, picaresque narratives beginning in revolutionary Russia and ending in Nazi Germany which, wrote Robert Nye in the Guardian, put Moorcock straight into the front rank of contemporary English novelists.

Shakespeare and Company
37 rue de la Bucherie
75005
Paris