Artful, Ali Smith
Artful, Ali Smith
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Artful

Author: Ali Smith

Narrator: Ali Smith

Unabridged: 4 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/21/2013


Synopsis

In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, 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 between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that art and life are never separate.

Artful is a celebration of and meaningful contribution to literature’s enduring worth in the world. There has never been a book quite like it.

About Ali Smith

Ali Smith was born in Inverness and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of three collections of stories and three novels. Hotel World was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize in 2001 and her latest novel, The Accidental, won the 2006 Whitbread Novel Award. Ali reviews regularly for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the TLS.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet

In all likelihood the form of her seasonal novels germinated from this challenge of making a novel from a series of lectures she gave. It begins with a genderless individual reading Oliver Twist and mourning her/his recently dead genderless partner. The lectures themselves are fictionalised as being......more

Goodreads review by MJ

An extended Smith short story, wrapped like bacon around the sausage of her illuminating Oxford lectures, makes up this debut non-fiction collection from the Best Living Scottish Novelist (caps mean cred). Her trope of using the second person to address an absent presence (in this case, Smith is the......more