BOOKS: Michael Smith reading at Shakespeare & Co.

Shakespeare and Company’s writer-in-residence, Michael Smith will be reading a selection of his work including his novel, The Giro Playboy, a twenty-first century beat classic in the making. It’s an utterly charming miniature picaresque and a portrait of a life blissfully unmoored. The Giro Playboy recounts the (mis)adventures of a delusional drifter and his wanderings from the north-east of London (where the streets are paved with gold) and on to Brighton and the badlands of Essex. Along the way he falls in love, drinks a lot of beer, eats too many sweets, ponders the meaning of life on the dole and gets admitted to hospital for a painful condition – all the time measuring his life in cigarettes. Michael has contributed to The Observer newspaper, The Idler and Zembla, Dazed & Confused and Good For Nothing. His new book Birds is due to be published with Faber and Faber in 2011.
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