Short Story Collections
A vitally alive and ever-surprising collection of stories from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women''s Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet ''Bold and sensitive. Smith''s prose is a joy'' Independent Individually lucid and luminous, these tales resonate subtly together. In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, expertly inching us closer to the bone, Ali Smith''s storytelling has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous. ***** ''Captures quiet epiphanies of the extraordinary in the mundane'' Sunday Times ''These stories fizz with life'' The Times Literary Supplement
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.
A single short story. Red sewn wraps, designed and bound by Sebastian Carter at The Rampart Lions Press. One of 200 numbered copies signed by Smith.
In these energetic, exhilarating stories, Ali Smith portrays a world of everyday dislocation, where people nevertheless find connection, mystery, and love. In “Astute Fiery Luxurious,” a misdelivered package throws the life of a couple into disarray. A boy’s unexplained illness in “I Know Something You Don’t Know” drives his mother to seek guidance from homeopathic healers, with inconclusive results. In “The Child,” an unnervingly mature young boy voices offensive humor that genteel society would rather not acknowledge. And a confident older woman meets her awkward fourteen-year-old self in “Writ” but can’t figure out how to guide her–or even whether she should. As Smith explores the subtle links between what we know and what we feel, she creates an exuberant, masterly collection that is packed full of ideas, humor, nuance, and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.
In 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.
From the acclaimed, award-winning author: 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 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 activism—and as a wonderful read from one of our finest authors.