Showing posts with label Alice Smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alice Smith. Show all posts

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Summer by Ali Smith review / A remarkable end to an extraordinary quartet

 

Alice Smith


BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Summer by Ali Smith review – a remarkable end to an extraordinary quartet


The last of Ali Smith’s seasonal series, a set of books that defines our fraught era, is also the first serious coronavirus novel



Alex Preston
Sunday 2 August 2020


I

’m not sure I’ve ever looked forward to a book as eagerly as Ali Smith’s Summer. This is the final instalment of her seasonal quartet, a series that has already been celebrated by reviewers and readers alike. A vast and dizzyingly ambitious project – each book is written and published in just a few months – the novels seek to be as up to date as it is possible for literature to be. With the Booker-shortlisted Autumn published in October 2016, Winter in November 2017, Spring in March 2019, and now Summer, the four books are both independent novels and work together as a complex, interrelated collage of reflections on the way we live now.
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Friday, June 5, 2015

My hero / Ali Smith by Alex Clark




Ali Smith in her garden at home in Cambridge. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer


My hero: Ali Smith by Alex Clark



It’s fitting that such a generous and open novelist, and such a champion of other writers, should win this year’s Baileys women’s prize for fiction 


Alex Clark
Fri 5 Jun 2015

In April, at a literary festival in her adopted home of Cambridge – the town she eventually settled in after growing up in Inverness, and where she began to write in earnest – Ali Smith presided over a panel of debut writers. The event is an annual fixture, in which Smith, who this week won the Baileys women’s prize for fiction for How to Be Both, selects the first novels that have most impressed her and introduces their fledgling authors to the public. Before each of the three – Sarah Bannan, Claire Lowdon and Sara Taylor – read from their books, Smith explained why she had chosen them, in a way that could hardly have given less sense of a grande dame of literature bestowing her imprimatur: warm, funny, communicative, yes – but also urgently engaged with the texts at hand. She congratulated the writers on doing something hard and daunting, and beckoned the audience in to share a world of stimulation and pleasure. Afterwards, people rushed to buy all three books. This is not a common state of affairs.

 But it is a common state of Smith. She is an endless booster of other writers’ work (dead or alive), because she believes in people and in words. She believes in a literary ecology that needs care and attention to flourish and without which we will be the poorer. “In all our individual states,” she has told me, “we are always communal. There is always a point where a hand reaches out to another hand.”

 The hand reaching out is there in all her work, drawing us close so we can hear whispered, mischievous stories of love, death, loss and otherness, stories that are both strikingly real and dreamily mythical. How to Be Both is a novel of companionship, its protagonists – a motherless modern teenager and a striving Renaissance artist – holding hands across the centuries; its paired stories are accessible to readers in whichever order they choose. It’s a book founded on the generosity and openness of its creator, and it simply wouldn’t have worked any other way.
THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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