Search results for ""Author Ali Smith""

Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our livesIn February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. 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.    A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.    Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things

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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThe unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartetOne day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she''s been left with after she''s spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom: ''Curlew or curfew? You choose.''And what''s any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago?Ali Smith''s novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.''[An] entertaining and expert portrayal of the wor

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'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema . . .'One hot summer a stranger arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family. Intriguing, beguiling, arresting, Amber brings love, joy, pain and not a little upheaval, throwing the carefully ordered world of the Smarts into the air. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely?'Joyous ... writing as rapture, as giddy delight' The Times'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer

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SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'Her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices' Observer What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.*****'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent'Smith is a masterful storyteller . . . Savour it' Evening Standard'Infectious in its energy and warmth' Daily Telegraph

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Discover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force quartet of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right nowAll four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer A Book of the Year according to: the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Evening Standard, The Times.'Dazzling' Daily TelegraphWinter? 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.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLERDiscover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force quartet of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right nowAll four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer 'Her best book yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and the present with a chorus of voices' Observer'An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons' Independent'State-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us' New Statesman'Smith tells stories in a voice you can't help but listen to' The TimesWhat unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?Spring. The great connective.With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door.The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?Hope springs eternal.LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2019Praise for the Seasonal Quartet:'Transcendental writing about art, death, political lies, and all the dimensions of love. It's a case not so much of reading between the lines as of being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way' Deborah Levy on Autumn'The novel of the year is obviously Autumn, which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain' Olivia Laing, Observer on Autumn'Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she's on fire these days... Combining brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defence of human decency and art' NPR on Winter'Rank[s] among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present' Financial Times on Winter'A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit that you feel Dickens would have recognised... Smith is engaged in an extended process of mythologizing the present states of Britain... Luminously beautiful' Observer on Winter

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A form-bending and endlessly inventive collection of short stories - from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form' Independent A middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. An innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child. Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, we see a 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 First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones in equal measure. One-of-a-kind Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.*****'Hurrah for Ali Smith . . . A bold and brilliant collection of stories by a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is' The Times'Gleefully turns the short story inside-out . . . Smith is such a dazzling author that finishing one of her books is always bittersweet' Scotland on Sunday

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Introduced by Ali Smith, the title of this group of poems about people is taken from Morgan’s poem ‘Pelagius’, the theologian who is a kind of alter ego. Morgan has the ability to enter into so many lives: the blind hunchback of ‘In the Snack-bar’, Jesus’s judge in ‘Pilate at Fortingall’, the Polish juggler and acrobat ‘Cinquevalli’ (another alter ego), even Rameses II in ‘The Mummy’. ‘Morgan, I said to myself, take note, / Take heart. In a time of confusion / You must make a stand.’

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"You will want to read this book at least three times: once in a headlong rush of fandom; then with an internet connection and a dictionary of poetic terms; and finally in a darkened room with the phone switched off and time to savour Smith's delicious, playful use of language. A truly bewitching collection" - Katy Guest, Independent on Sunday"Smith is a trickster, an etymologist, a fantasist, a pun freak, an ontologist... a wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious" - The New York TimesIn four short stories – fusions of poetry – Ali Smith pays tribute to the sources, the people and the places which produce and nurture life and art. In an opening up of norths and souths, she traces unexpected conduits between Cambridge and the north of Scotland. Like all of Ali Smith’s work, here spot-lit by Sarah Wood’s delicate art, this is a book that will blow fresh air through the mind and set readers’ pulses racing.

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The romantic forested landscape of southwest Germany is the setting for the birth of a friendship that will haunt sixteen-year-old Hans Schwarz for the rest of his life. Hans is Jewish, the son of a doctor who is confident that the rise of the Nazis is only 'a temporary illness' afflicting his beloved country. Hans's new classmate, Konradin von Hohenfels, is a dazzling young aristocrat whose mother keeps a portrait of Hitler on her dressing-table. Hans is immediately drawn to Konradin, and thrilled when a close bond forms between them, forged by common interests that set them apart from the other boys. But their loyalties are soon tested in ways they could not have imagined. Three decades later, from the vantage point of New York City, Hans once again confronts this life-shaping episode from his youth, through a stunning revelation that he stumbles upon by chance. In its story of friendship undone by History, Reunion combines the explosive compression of a fable with the emotional depth of an epic novel many times its length.

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHKatherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling and perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they range from short sharp studies to longer, richer tales, encompassing her three major volumes Bliss, The Garden Party and In a German Pension, and fifteen tantalizing fragments of unfinished stories published after her tragic death, including 'Honesty', an intriguing tale of two bachelors, and 'The Doves' Nest', an exquisite story of a widowed mother and her daughter in the Riviera who receive a mysterious gentleman caller. Graceful, delicate and quietly devastating, they observe apparently trivial incidents to create sensitive, often painful revelations of her characters' inner lives.

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHA classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, published with an introduction by Ali Smith in Penguin Modern Classics.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounding the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels.Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a British born Surrealist painter and writer described, alongside people such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, as one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. Born in Lancashire to a strict Catholic family, she first came into contact with surrealism through her lover, Surrealist painter Max Ernst, before moving to Mexico in 1942. The Hearing Trumpet, her most famous piece of writing, was first published in France in 1974.If you enjoyed The Hearing Trumpet, you might like Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days' Luis Buñuel'One of the most original, joyful, satisfying and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century'Ali Smith'This book is so inspiring...I love its freedom, its humour and how it invents its own laws. What specifically do I take from her? Her wig'Björk

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A poetic, passionate and intensely personal exploration of colour written during the final year of Derek Jarman's life -- with a new introduction by Ali Smith.In Chroma, his most poetic and lyrical book, Derek Jarman explores the uses of colour. Shifting across the spectrum and from the medieval to the modern, he draws on the work of great colour theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. Interwoven with these musings are evocative memories from Jarman's childhood and illustrious career, along with reflections on his deteriorating health. Written a year before Jarman’s death, and as his eyesight was failing, this is an intensely personal work; a paean from an artist seeking to memorialise the extraordinary power of colour even while it receded from his own life.

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With a cover design by Lucienne DayWhen Mrs Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he is a 'pisseur de copie', that he 'urinates frightful prose', little does she realise the repercussions. Holding that 'no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest' Mrs Hawkins refuses to retract her judgement, and as a consequence, loses not one, but two much-sought-after jobs in publishing. Now, years older, successful, and happily a far cry from Kensington, she looks back over the dark days that followed, in which she was embroiled in a mystery involving anonymous letters, quack remedies, blackmail and suicide.

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'The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times.' Ian RankinIn this first novel by Muriel Spark - author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - the only things that aren't ambiguous are Spark's matchless originality and glittering wit.With an introduction by Ali Smith.Caroline Rose is plagued by the tapping of typewriter keys and the strange, detached narration of her every thought and action. She has an unusual problem - she realises she is in a novel. Her fellow characters are also possibly deluded: Laurence, her former lover, finds diamonds in a loaf of bread - could his elderly grandmother really be a smuggler? And Baron Stock, her bookseller friend, believes he is on the trail of England's leading Satanist.'A master of malice and mayhem.' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times'Brilliantly original and fascinating.' Evelyn Waugh'A light, clever, mirthful tour de force ... It disrupts and charms its readers with its combination of wit, precision, intelligence and hilarity. As vibrant as ever, more than fifty years after its first appearance.' Ali Smith

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This title is presented with an introduction by Ali Smith. A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances, Angela Carter's witty and bawdy novel is populated with as many sets of twins, and mistaken identities as any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.

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This is an exclusive limited edition with a preface by Liz Lochhead and a new introduction by Ali Smith. Liz Lochhead is one of the leading poets writing in Britain today. This, her debut collection, published in 1972, was a landmark publication. Writing at a time when the landscape of Scottish poetry was male dominated, hers was a new voice, tackling subjects that resonated with readers – as it still does. Her poetry paved the way, and inspired, countless new voices including Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy. Still writing and performing today, fifty years on from her first book of poetry, Liz Lochhead has been awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and was Scotland’s second modern Makar, succeeding Edwin Morgan. Memo for Spring is accessible, vital and always as honest as it is hopeful. Driving through this collection are themes of pain, acceptance, loss and triumph.

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In 1964, Nell Dunn spoke to nine of her friends over a bottle of wine about men, sex, work, money, babies, freedom and love. Novelist Edna O'Brien remembers being 'very frightened' of having her nipples touched. The Pop Artist Pauline Boty says she got married to the 'first man I could talk very freely to'. Kathy Collier, who Dunn worked with in a Battersea sweet factory, confesses that she had thought about suicide. After more than forty years out of print, Talking to Women is still as sparkling, honest, profound, funny and wise as when it was first published. With a new afterword by Nell Dunn.

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Barbara Hepworth is one of the most important artists of the 20th century, yet she has been the subject of relatively few monographs in comparison to her male counterparts. This biography moves beyond the traditional narratives of modernism, truth to materials, and the landscape to provide a penetrating insight into Hepworth’s remarkable life, work and legacy. Barbara Hepworth was reproached for single-mindedness in her lifetime, with critics and commentators framing both the artist and her work as ‘cool and restrained’. A continued focus on her modernist abstract sculpture of the 1930s and its relation to her male contemporaries has left vast swathes of her work and related passions overlooked. This fully illustrated biography reflects for the first time Hepworth’s multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and networked approach, shedding light as never before on her interests in music, dance, poetry, contemporary politics, science and technology; her engagement with these fields through friends and networks as well as her artistic practice; and the ways in which she synthesized sometimes seemingly conflicting disciplines and ideas into one coherent and inspirational philosophy of art and life.With 178 illustrations

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'Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed' The New York TimesWith delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her yearning to belong and the urge to run away.

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Greenvoe, the tight-knit community on the Orcadian island of Hellya, has existed unchanged for generations, but Operation Black Star requires the island for unspecified purposes and threatens the islanders’ way of life. A whole host of characters - The Skarf, failed fishermen and Marxist historian; Ivan Westray, boatman and dallier; pious creeler Samuel Whaness; drunken fishermen Bert Kerston; earth-mother Alice Voar, and meths-drinker Timmy Folster - are vividly brought to life in this sparkling mixture of prose and poetry. In the end Operation Black Star fails, but not before it has ruined the island; but the book ends on a note of hope as the islanders return to celebrate the ritual rebirth of Hellya.

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A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean is the setting for a most disturbing crime in this reissue featuring a new introduction by Ali Smith. A disturbing mystery awaits Paul and Jane Sinclair when they arrive in Eden-Olympia, a high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes. Jane is to work as a doctor for those who live in this ultra-modern workers’ paradise. But what caused her predecessor to go on a shooting spree that made headlines around the world? As Paul investigates, he begins to uncover a thriving subculture of crime that is spiralling out of control. Both novel of ideas and complex thriller, ‘Super-Cannes’ is an extraordinary satire from the author of ‘Empire of the Sun’, ‘The Drowned World’ and ‘Crash’. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Robert Macfarlane, Hari Kunzru, James Lever and Zadie Smith) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHYoung Chris Guthrie lives a brutal life in the harsh landscape of northern Scotland, torn between her passion for the land, duty to her family and her love of books. When her mother, broken by repeated childbirths, takes her own life and poisons her two youngest children, Chris is left with her father to run the farm on her own. Soon she is alone, and for the first time can choose how to spend her life. But as the First World War begins, everything changes, and the young men leave Scotland for battle. The first in Gibbon's classic trilogy A Scot's Quair, Sunset Song is infused with local vernacular, and innovatively blends Scots and English in an intense description of Scottish life in the early twentieth century.

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Margaret Tait (1918–1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. 'In a documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, draws on Tait’s three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.

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'Wonderful . . . all killer, no filler' Red Magazine'Dazzling stories, as inventive as they are inspiring' Daily Mirror 'Where power and feminist rage meet' Stylist______________________________A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers:Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue, Stella Duffy, Linda Grant, Claire Kohda, CN Lester, Kirsty Logan, Caroline O'Donoghue, Chibundu Onuzo, Helen Oyeyemi, Rachel Seiffert, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Smith - introduced by Sandi Toksvig. DRAGON. TYGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE. VITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT. FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO. For centuries past, and all across the world, there are words that have defined and decried us. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood; words that tell a story.In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time.'A slick collection of clever tales, with something for bluestockings and banshees alike' Guardian'Delightful, thought-provoking' Louisa Young, Perspectives

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London today is embattled as rarely before. In a city of enormous wealth, poverty is rampant. The burnt-out hulk of Grenfell Tower stands as an appalling reminder that inequality can be so acute as to be murderous. Here, Claire Armitstead has drawn together fiction, reportage and poetry to capture the schisms defining the contemporary city. With nearly 40% of the capital's population born outside the country, Tales of Two Londons eschews what Armitstead labels a "tyranny of tone," emphasising voices rarely heard. Featuring writers such as Ali Smith, Jon Snow, Arifa Akbar and Ruth Padel alongside stories from previously unpublished immigrants and refugees, this is a compelling collection which captures the fabric of the city: its housing, its food, its pubs, its buses, even its graveyards.

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Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across... A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers 'acting on a tip-off' and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape... An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery - first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking - writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention... These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe's new underclass - its refugees. While those with "citizenship" enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain's policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims' stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

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Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother’s refusal to ‘go gentle’ while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir ‘shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence’ (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.

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In 2018 the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts will host major exhibitions of the work of Tacita Dean. Each will provide a different encounter with her art. This book brings together new and existing works from all three exhibitions - LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE - with texts offering a unique insight into Dean's work by leading writers including Alexandra Harris, Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith. Published at a particularly prolific period for Dean, this book provides a new and authoritative view of a hugely influential artist who has been at the forefront of British art for over twenty years. The volume is published with three different covers.

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Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love. It is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart.With an introduction by author Ali Smith.When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village.'Kay carefully registers the technical difficulties of transgendered life . . . She leaves us with a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love' – New York Times

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