Ali Smith - Author
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, and Public Library and other stories. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.
Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons.
October 2017 Book of the Month | Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves. Here comes Autumn. On being Longlisted for the Man Booker prize Ali Smith said; "A lovely surprise – I'm very very chuffed – but especially to be on this longlist, in such bloody good company". You can read an interview with her on the Man Booker website here.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves. Here comes Autumn.
Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015. Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2014. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 this is an unusual and highly inventive novel. It is in fact two related novellas. In one we meet George, a 16 year old girl whose mother has just died and who’s trying to navigate her own grief whilst keeping her father away from a quick descent to alcoholism and protect her brother from his grief. This story shifts between the present and a time before her mother’s death so we discover a little more about their relationship. Crucially George’s mother introduces her to the work of an Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa, just before she dies and George plays truant to visit the National Gallery to see more of his work and work through her grief. The other story sees the ghost of Francesco summoned suddenly to the National Gallery in 21st Century London to be the familiar of a girl called George who’s becoming strangely obsessed with Francesco. The stories can and are designed to be read in either order and indeed copies were printed with the story order changed so some readers get it one way and others the other. Complicated but hugely rewarding and a fascinating way of absorbing a story. The Costa Judges said Smith's novel was “Dazzlingly imagined and daringly inventive, it’s both resonant and moving.” Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2014. Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2014. One of our Books of the Year 2014.
Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015. Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2014. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 this is an unusual and highly inventive novel. It is in fact two related novellas. In one we meet George, a 16 year old girl whose mother has just died and who’s trying to navigate her own grief whilst keeping her father away from a quick descent to alcoholism and protect her brother from his grief. This story shifts between the present and a time before her mother’s death so we discover a little more about their relationship. Crucially George’s mother introduces her to the work of an Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa, just before she dies and George plays truant to visit the National Gallery to see more of his work and work through her grief. The other story sees the ghost of Francesco summoned suddenly to the National Gallery in 21st Century London to be the familiar of a girl called George who’s becoming strangely obsessed with Francesco. The stories can and are designed to be read in either order and indeed copies were printed with the story order changed so some readers get it one way and others the other. Complicated but hugely rewarding and a fascinating way of absorbing a story. The Costa Judges said Smith's novel was “Dazzlingly imagined and daringly inventive, it’s both resonant and moving.” Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2014. Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2014. One of our Books of the Year 2014.
There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party ...' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they at first appear. There but for the has been hailed as one of the best books of 2011 by Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Patrick Ness, Sebastian Barry, Boyd Tonkin, Erica Wagner and Nick Barley.
This review is provided by bookgroup.info.The setting is Norfolk in the long hot summer of 2003. The Smart family are staying in a miserable cottage for the holidays while the war in Iraq rumbles in the background. The story is told in turn from the point of view of the four family members; Astrid a bright, video camera wielding, twelve year old girl; Magnus her seventeen year old brother, traumatised by the suicide of a bullied classmate for which he feels partly responsible; Eve the children’s mother, a writer with writer’s block, and Michael their lecherous, lecturer step-father. If it all sounds rather tediously familiar so far but don’t despair. Events take a turn when a mysterious blonde female stranger infiltrates their lives. But who is Amber? Eve supposes she’s one of Michael’s lovers. Michael supposes she’s come to interview Eve and the kids are just glad there’s someone else there to relieve the tedium. No-one challenges her appearance at the house and all four are seduced by her and ultimately forced to re-examine their lives. This is just the story. The book’s tour de force is Ali Smith’s use of language. She is clever, funny and completely unpretentious. I particularly like the (totally believable) voice of twelve year old Astrid:“They’re all asleep. Nobody knows she is awake. Nobody is any the wiser. Any the Wiser sounds like a character from ancient history. Astrid in the year 1003BC (Before Celebrity) goes to the woods where Any the Wiser………” and so it goes on as we enter Astrid’s stream of consciousness. This is the contemporary novel at its best - rich and satisfying.The Lovereading view...The engrossing tale of a middle-class family and the events that unfold when a stranger steps into their midst. Amber's arrival changes the family's lives dramatically as she quickly bonds with the Smarts, bewitching them all. Smith's writing is fantastic, capturing the voices of all the characters superbly, but especially that of the adolescent Astrid who steals the show. On the Orange Fiction Prize 2006 short list and utterly compelling.
Category Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award 2005 and short listed for the Man Booker. The engrossing tale of a middle-class family and the events that unfold when a stranger steps into their midst. Amber's arrival changes the family's lives dramatically as she quickly bonds with the Smarts, bewitching them all. Smith's writing is fantastic, capturing the voices of all the characters superbly, but especially that of the adolescent Astrid who steals the show. Utterly compelling.
A cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, a treasure trove - we love bookshops because they possess a unique kind of magic. In Browse Henry Hitchings asks fifteen writers from around the world to reveal their favourite bookshops, each conjuring a specific time and place. Ali Smith chronicles the secrets and personal stories hidden within the pages of secondhand books; Alaa Al Aswany tells of the Cairo bookshop where revolutionaries gathered during the 2011 uprisings; Elif Shafak evokes the bookstores of Istanbul, their chaos and diversity, their aroma of tobacco and coffee. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor recalls the quandary of choosing just one book at a favourite childhood store in Nairobi, while Iain Sinclair shares his grief on witnessing a beloved old haunt close down. Others explore bookshops they have stumbled upon, adored and become addicted to, from Delhi to Bogota. These inquisitive, enchanting pieces are a collective celebration of bookshops - for anyone who has ever fallen under their spell. Contributors include: Alaa Al Aswany (Egypt) Stefano Benni (Italy) Michael Dirda (USA) Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine) Yiyun Li (China) Pankaj Mishra (India) Dorthe Nors (Denmark) Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) Elif Shafak (Turkey) Ian Sansom (UK) Iain Sinclair (UK) Ali Smith (UK) Sasa Stanisic (Germany/Bosnia) Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Colombia)
BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, New York Times . . . 'Capacious, surprising, generous . . . A book with Christmas at its heart' Guardian 'Dazzling. Grief and pain are transfigured by luminous moments of humour, insight and connection . . . Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen' Daily Telegraph 'Graceful, mischievous, joyful . . . Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope' Independent 'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit . . . Luminously beautiful' Observer From the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be both . . . The unmissable second novel in Ali Smith's acclaimed 'Seasonal' quartet -- a Christmas story like no other Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter.
Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's remix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world.
In November 2017 Ali Smith gave the annual Muriel Spark Lecture to kick off the Muriel Spark centenary celebrations. Those lucky enough to get tickets were treated to an invigorating, joyous call-and-response between two of our best writers, both supremely talented in the playful interrogation of truth, power, art and living. In Spark, Smith finds the most formidable inspiration. In Smith, Spark has a formidable champion, one who shows us how Spark's work resonates now more than ever. If you want to read a regenerative blast in praise of how and why fiction matters, start here, and, as Spark writes, `Hear me to the end.'
Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons.
Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter the second novel in Ali Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 The dazzling second novel in Ali Smith's essential Seasonal Quartet -- from the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be both Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter.
October 2017 Book of the Month | Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves. Here comes Autumn. On being Longlisted for the Man Booker prize Ali Smith said; "A lovely surprise – I'm very very chuffed – but especially to be on this longlist, in such bloody good company". You can read an interview with her on the Man Booker website here.
Guanyadora del Whitbread Award i finalista del Man Booker Prize, L'accidental es l'espectacular novel*la que Ali Smith escriu sobre una nena de 12 anys, la seva familia i els seus secrets. Una famlia s'installa a una casa de camp a Norfolk durant tres mesos perqu la dona i mare de la famlia pugui acabar la seva nova obra. Desprs arriba l'Amber, una dona de qui no saben res per que modifica les seves rutines i la seva realitat. L'Amber oferir noves perspectives sobre les seves vides i els seus secrets per... Qui s ella? A qui han obert la porta de casa seva?Atrevidament intelligent i escrita amb una irresistible aroma de lirisme i saviesa, L'accidental explora la naturalesa de la veritat, el paper i la necessitat dels canvis i el transformador poder de saber explicar histries.
Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we've read over our livesour own personal librariesmake of us? What does the unraveling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith's new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make. Woven between the stories are conversations with writers and readers reflecting on the essential role that libraries have played in their lives. At a time when public libraries around the world face threats of cuts and closures, this collection stands as a work of literary activismand as a wonderful read from one of our finest authors.
Why are books so very powerful? The stories in this collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us and shock us, change us and challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once and how they remind us to pay attention to the world that we make. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.
A richly inventive new collection of stories from Ali Smith, author of How to be both, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize and the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we've read over our lives - our own personal libraries - make of us? What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith's new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make. Public libraries are places of joy, freedom, community and discovery - and right now they are under threat from funding cuts and widespread closures across the UK and further afield. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.
Punand in paralel povestile efervescente pe care le au de spus un pictor italian renascentist si o adolescenta moderna, aceasta carte exploreaza iubirea, arta si domeniul posibilitatii cu o extraordinara prospetime, ceea ce i a adus o nominalizare pe lista finalistilor la premiul Man Booker si premiul Goldsmith pentru originalitate."e; The GuardianSuferinE a doliului este ntipA ritA n vieE ile celor douA eroine orfane de mamA ale lui Smith, dar, n ciuda nverE unatei lipse de sentimentalism E i a seriozitA E ii profunde a ntrebA rilor pe care le pune, romanul Cum sA fii E i una, E i alta e plin de entuziasm nu numai faE A de limbaj, literaturA E i puterea transformatoare a artei, ci E i faE A de ncurcatele dileme ale unei vieE i de om, cnd ai vrea sA fii mai multe deodatA , nu doar sA te ncadrezi ntro singurA categorie de persoane. DorinE a de a nu fi nici aE a, nici altfel deschide posibilitA E i care nseamnA cA te poE i strA dui mereu, pentru totdeauna, sA fii E i una, E i alta. Cu mare subtilitate E i inventivitate, Smith continuA sA extindA graniE ele romanului."e; The TelegraphNu existA nici o ndoialA cA Smith e de o ndrA znealA ameE itoare. EE ti luat pe sus de forE a inovatoare a romanului pnA cnd ajungi, cu respiraE ia tA iatA , la ultima paginA ."e; The Observer Acei scriitori care fac predicE ii apocaliptice despre moartea romanului ar trebui sA citeascA romanul reinventat al lui Smith E i sA observe cu atenE ie ctA viaE A cuprinde."e; The Independent
The crow crossed the sky, slow-beating her wings. Beat, beat, beat. It was night, not yet morning, and her feathers were so black that she coasted the air invisible above the city wall. Thus begins Ali Smith's masterful retelling of Sophocles' tragedy about a young Theban princess, who decides to bury her dishonoured brother Polynices against King Creon's express orders - with heart-breaking consequences. Vividly told and wonderfully illustrated, Smith's Antigone is the perfect introduction to Greek tragedy for any reader, young or old.
A STUNNING RETELLING BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ALI SMITH 'Joyful' JEANETTE WINTERSON 'Pulls you in and doesn't let you go . . . bold and brilliant' JACKIE KAY 'A glorious wide-awake dream of a book . . . By the time I finished, my heart was beating and tears stood in my eyes, even as I had the biggest smile written all over my face' KIRSTY GUNN Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world.
Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015. Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2014. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 this is an unusual and highly inventive novel. It is in fact two related novellas. In one we meet George, a 16 year old girl whose mother has just died and who’s trying to navigate her own grief whilst keeping her father away from a quick descent to alcoholism and protect her brother from his grief. This story shifts between the present and a time before her mother’s death so we discover a little more about their relationship. Crucially George’s mother introduces her to the work of an Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa, just before she dies and George plays truant to visit the National Gallery to see more of his work and work through her grief. The other story sees the ghost of Francesco summoned suddenly to the National Gallery in 21st Century London to be the familiar of a girl called George who’s becoming strangely obsessed with Francesco. The stories can and are designed to be read in either order and indeed copies were printed with the story order changed so some readers get it one way and others the other. Complicated but hugely rewarding and a fascinating way of absorbing a story. The Costa Judges said Smith's novel was “Dazzlingly imagined and daringly inventive, it’s both resonant and moving.” Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2014. Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2014. One of our Books of the Year 2014.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
The crow crossed the sky, slow-beating her wings. Beat, beat, beat. It was night, not yet morning, and her feathers were so black that she coasted the air invisible above the city wall. Thus begins Ali Smith's retelling of Sophocles' tragedy, about a young Theban princess who decides to bury her dishonoured brother Polynices, against King Creon's express orders with heart-breaking consequences.
Rachel Kneebone (born 1973, Oxfordshire) is a London-based artist internationally renowned for her porcelain sculptures that intricately fuse human, natural and abstract forms to explore universal themes such as sexual desire, mortality, anguish and despair. Launched in anticipation of`399 Days', Kneebone's latest presentation at White Cube, London, in summer 2014, this publication features works from Kneebone's acclaimed solo exhibition at Brooklyn Museum in 2012, which included eight of the artist's works in dialogue with fifteen bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin. Featuring a foreword by Catherine Morris and a text by Ali Smith, this beautifully designed and produced hardback publication contains over fifty colour reproductions and has been developed with support from Brooklyn Museum.
A small girl's fight against male authority The crow crossed the sky, slow-beating her wings. Beat, beat, beat. It was night, not yet morning, and her feathers were so black that she coasted the air invisible above the city wall. Thus begins Ali Smith's retelling of Sophocles' tragedy, about a young Theban princess, who decides to bury her dishonoured brother Polynices, against King Creon's express orders-with heart-breaking consequences. Ali Smith was born in Inverness, where she was quite good at ice-skating and spent a lot of time on the back of a black Shetland pony called Hodrum. When she was about seven years old she began to write stories and poems. The first poem that she remembers writing was about a girl called Isabel debating with an adder, which was threatening to bite her, about which of them would live the longest. (Isabel won.)
There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party ...' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they at first appear. There but for the has been hailed as one of the best books of 2011 by Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Patrick Ness, Sebastian Barry, Boyd Tonkin, Erica Wagner and Nick Barley.
There but for the is the sparkling satirical novel by bestselling Ali Smith 'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party . . .' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they at first appear. There but for the was hailed as one of the best books of 2011 by Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Patrick Ness, Sebastian Barry, Boyd Tonkin, Erica Wagner and Nick Barley. 'Dazzlingly inventive' A.S. Byatt 'Whimsically devastating. Playful, humorous, serious, profoundly clever and profoundly affecting' Guardian 'A real gem' Erica Wagner, The Times 'Eccentric, adventurous, intoxicating, dazzling. This is a novel with serious ambitions that remains huge fun to read' Literary Review 'If you liked Smith's earlier fiction, you will know that she enjoys setting up a situation before chucking in a literary Molotov cocktail then describing what happens' Sunday Express 'Wonderful, word-playful, compelling' Jeanette Winterson 'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph 'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard
Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough. Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out. Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever. Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think. This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60% of the author's work and as low as 30% with characters and plotlines removed.
The First Person and Other Stories is the fourth collection of short stories by Ali Smith. The First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones. Always intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, Smith explores the ways and whys of storytelling. In one, a middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. In another, an innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child. Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, a third presents its narrator, 'Ali', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and - a nymph. Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, the stories in The First Person and Other Stories are packed full of ideas, jokes, nuance and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other. 'Smith's is a profoundly optimistic vision. These stories are frightening yet funny, and the sheer exuberance and playfulness of her language endows dark matters with a lightness of touch' New Statesman 'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton 'Terrific . . . hurrah for Ali Smith . . . The best short-story writers make it look as easy as making a cup of tea. Ali Smith is one of these . . . A bold and brilliant collection of stories by a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is' Times 'A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form' Independent
This review is provided by bookgroup.info.The setting is Norfolk in the long hot summer of 2003. The Smart family are staying in a miserable cottage for the holidays while the war in Iraq rumbles in the background. The story is told in turn from the point of view of the four family members; Astrid a bright, video camera wielding, twelve year old girl; Magnus her seventeen year old brother, traumatised by the suicide of a bullied classmate for which he feels partly responsible; Eve the children’s mother, a writer with writer’s block, and Michael their lecherous, lecturer step-father. If it all sounds rather tediously familiar so far but don’t despair. Events take a turn when a mysterious blonde female stranger infiltrates their lives. But who is Amber? Eve supposes she’s one of Michael’s lovers. Michael supposes she’s come to interview Eve and the kids are just glad there’s someone else there to relieve the tedium. No-one challenges her appearance at the house and all four are seduced by her and ultimately forced to re-examine their lives. This is just the story. The book’s tour de force is Ali Smith’s use of language. She is clever, funny and completely unpretentious. I particularly like the (totally believable) voice of twelve year old Astrid:“They’re all asleep. Nobody knows she is awake. Nobody is any the wiser. Any the Wiser sounds like a character from ancient history. Astrid in the year 1003BC (Before Celebrity) goes to the woods where Any the Wiser………” and so it goes on as we enter Astrid’s stream of consciousness. This is the contemporary novel at its best - rich and satisfying.The Lovereading view...The engrossing tale of a middle-class family and the events that unfold when a stranger steps into their midst. Amber's arrival changes the family's lives dramatically as she quickly bonds with the Smarts, bewitching them all. Smith's writing is fantastic, capturing the voices of all the characters superbly, but especially that of the adolescent Astrid who steals the show. On the Orange Fiction Prize 2006 short list and utterly compelling.
Artful presents, in book form, four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. Full of both the poignancy and humour of fiction and all the sideways insights and jaunty angles you would expect from Ali Smith's criticism, it explores form, style, life, love, death, mortality, immortality and what art and writing can mean. Part fiction, part essay, Artful is a revelation of what writing can do and a reaffirmation of Ali Smith's unmatched literary powers. 'Playful, full of insight and humanity, constantly surprising . . . another genuine attempt to bust open the boundaries of literary form' Jonathan Coe, Metro 'Joyful and optimistic. Will be entertaining reading for anyone interested in the art of writing, also of living, well' New Statesman 'Glittering inventiveness. Not just a ghost story, but also a love letter. As emotionally freighted as a piece of storytelling, as intellectually rigorous as an academic's essay' Independent 'An insight into an author who is in love with books, invention and words in all their depth and shiny surface' Herald 'A revelation, a new kind of book altogether, a book that defies categorisation and leaps out of every box anyone could try and put it in; a book that marries fiction to nonfiction, literary criticism to essays; a book that is as serious as it is witty, as light as it is enlightening. Artful makes you glad to be alive' Observer, Books of the Year 'One of the marvelous things about this book is its reconciliation of the serious - both in the form of this crumbling, smelly guest and in its ardent advocacy of art - and light. Smith, whose love of words and skill at wordplay has already been made apparent in her stories and novels, performs dodge after dodge after dodge . . . what Smith has done with Artful is to invent a new form apart from form, to build a kind of Frankenstein's monster inside the act of art' LA Review of Books 'Smith is a trickster, an etymologist, a fantasist, a pun-freak, an ontologist, a transgenrenatrix . . . A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. Artful, in which she tugs at God's sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner' New York Times 'These brief, acrobatic lectures . . . perform spectacular feats of criticism. Each is as playful as it is powerful, as buoyant as it is brilliant' NPR 'Contemplative, electrifying' Publishers Weekly
Other Stories and Other Stories is a stunning collection of short stories from Ali Smith. Individually lucid and luminous, these formally inventive and exquisite tales resonate subtly together. In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, and lightly and expertly inching us closer to the bone, storytelling itself has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous. 'Beautifully written and quietly unsettling' Big Issue 'Bold and sensitive. Smith's prose is a joy' Independent 'A wonderful collection; deceptively easy on one level with its whirling library of ghost story, funny story, love story, scary story, and more. Like Russian dolls, separate yet invisibly linked, they unfold from and into one another' Herald 'Smith breathes life into her imagined words with a true understanding of the craft of the short-story writer. She dances surely and lightly over the form' Guardian 'Captures quiet epiphanies of the extraordinary in the mundane' Sunday Times 'These stories fizz with life' The Times Literary Supplement
A brilliant new collection of stories from a much loved and highly praised author. Stories for people who've grown up being told time is running out - and don't want it to . . . How do you ever know the whole story? How do you ever know even part of the story? How do you find meaning when chance and coincidence could, after all, just be chance and coincidence? In a celebration of connections and missed connections, an inquiry into everything from flies and trees and books to sex, art, drunkenness and love, Smith rewrites the year's cycle into a very modern calendar.
Ali Smith's masterful, ambitious Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . . 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson 'An extremely readable, easy-flowing writer and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent. . . a wonderful piece of sustained imagination' Independent 'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open form the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times
A seminal fiction collection that stretches from Gertrude Stein to Grace Paley, from Edith Wharton to Angela Carter, from Mae West to Margaret Atwood, from Zora Neale Hurston to Joyce Carol Oates. Add to this another ninety-two brilliant writers a reader can relish the thought of careering between - and all collected together in the one anthology. An international celebration of extracts that chart our time: stories of poverty and wealth, work and play, tales of changing environments - both urban and rural, in peace and wartime. A book of Virago authors with every year of the twentieth century represented by groundbreaker after literary groundbreaker. Brilliant Careers gathers all the energies and circumstances of twentieth-century women writers into the one book, covering ten decades from the century closest to all our hearts, swinging from one end to the other of a hundred years of history and change via the very best of twentieth century fiction.
There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths. 'Ingenious, shimmering fiction, written with a poetic grace that subtly illuminates the tensions between hope and desire, between past and present' Scotland on Sunday
A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.
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