DOCSLIB.ORG

There but for the Free

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
There but for the Free FREE THERE BUT FOR THE PDF Ali Smith | 384 pages | 23 Sep 2014 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780141025193 | English | London, United Kingdom There but for the by Ali Smith - review | Books | The Guardian Look Inside. When a dinner-party guest named Miles locks himself in an upstairs room and refuses to come out, he sets off a media frenzy. He also sets in motion a mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, one that harnesses acrobatic verbal playfulness to a truly affecting story. Miles communicates only by cryptic notes slipped under the door. There But for the see him through the eyes of four people who barely know him, ranging from a precocious child to a confused elderly woman. As it probes our paradoxical need for both separation and true connection, There but for the balances cleverness with compassion, the surreal with the deeply, movingly real, in a way that only Ali Smith can. More about Ali Smith. If you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, [Smith is] someone to relish. Beautifully elusive. It is really about small stuff like life and death and the meaning of human existence, all told with sharp humor and real insight. Exceedingly There But for the. A book about loss and retention: about what we forget and what we remember, about the people who pass through our lives and what bits of them cling to our consciousness. Contains all the There But for the, solid stuff of a novel. With her penchant for wordplay on full display, the author of The Accidental switches between the perspectives of four people whose lives have been peripherally There But for the by her gentle shut-in, a man who, like J. Smith blasts a window open in our heads. Here we have a novel, and a novelist, delighting in the joy of language itself. Smith is a writer with a rich array of conventional strengths. Her prose responds to the world with loving attentiveness. The writing in There but for the is lovely, the imagery sharp and moving, and the flow unstoppable. Nobody writes with more panache. She always surprises, she never disappoints. Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. Read An Excerpt. Jul 24, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Sep 13, ISBN Available from:. Paperback —. About There But For The When a dinner-party guest named Miles There But for the himself in an upstairs room and refuses to come out, he sets off a media frenzy. Also by Ali Smith. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Alan Hollinghurst. The Edwardians. Vita Sackville-West. The Rachel Papers. The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing. The Blue Afternoon. William Boyd. The News from Spain. Joan Wickersham. The Accidental. The Photograph. Penelope Lively. Quartet in Autumn. Hotel Du Lac. Anita Brookner. The Autograph Man. How to Save Your Own Life. Jonathan Coe. The Safety of Objects. Lorrie Moore. Salley Vickers. Margery Kempe. Robert Gluck. Freddy and Fredericka. Mark Helprin. England, England. Julian Barnes. The Witches There But for the Eastwick. Louis de Bernieres. My Uncle Oswald. Tom McCarthy. Hope: a Tragedy. Shalom Auslander. The Invisible Circus. Jennifer Egan. The Buddha of Suburbia. Hanif Kureishi. The Go-Between. To the North. Elizabeth Bowen. The Summer Before the Dark. Emerald City. Related Articles. Looking for More Great Reads? Download Hi Res. LitFlash The eBooks you want at the lowest prices. Read it Forward Read it first. Pass it on! Stay in Touch Sign up. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. Become a Member There But for the earning points There But for the buying books! 'There but for the grace of God, go I' - meaning and origin. Symbol alert! A small boy appears, jimmies the flaps off with a dinner knife and instructs the man in how to make a paper airplane. Inside, underneath, it is packed tight into itself with surprising neatness like origami, like a small machine. The point of those mailbox flaps will become apparent, or semi-apparent, only at the very end of the book, but from the beginning There But for the paper plane serves as an apt emblem of Ms. The plot borrows There But for the device Ms. In the new book a guest at a dinner party in Greenwich, England — a man named Miles Garth — gets up between the main course and dessert and locks himself in There But for the upstairs bedroom, where he remains for months. When word about Miles or Milo, as he is popularly known gets out, he becomes a celebrity. Crowds camp out, hoping to sight him at the bedroom window, and they light candles and leave teddy bears. Brooke, delighted with language and exploring all its possibilities, is a helpless punster. Yet there is a thematic point to all this showing off, or to most of it, anyway. Anna used to work at a refugee organization she calls the Center for Temporary Permanence, and that, or its reverse — permanent temporariness — is the condition the novel explores in its intricate cross-weaving and careful ellipses. The main web we have for holding experience together, the novel suggests — for recreating a past in the present — is language itself, which in Ms. Yet language here also proves itself to be dense and referential, capable of making unexpected connections and of imprinting itself feelingly on the mind in a phrase, a rhyme, a snatch of song lyric. Home Page World U. There But For The, By Ali Smith | The Independent I know There But for the than one person who, when picking up a book to see if it's worth reading, turns to page 62 and, if that's any good, buys it. This is a sound technique, as far as it goes, but I prefer to start as the author wished me to. So I hurled a copy of The Da Vinci Code across the room in disgust before I'd even finished the first sentence; and I There But for the this book to my bosom also before I'd even finished the first sentence. The opening words are: "The fact is, imagine a man …" I loved that glaring disjunction, that violent yoking together of fact and imagination, seemingly artless, casually knowing. This is a writer who has inhaled the masters of what was once called the avant garde in a way that writers from Britain rarely do. Maybe all English, with the possible exception of Jeanette Winterson. And Nicola Barker. If I have made any glaring omissions about the English, do write in. One interesting thing about unconventional narration is that it neatly sidesteps the "oh-no-he-didn't" problem, whereby an inept author who is often, to the boundless vexation of readers such as myself, a raging bestseller cannot convince us of the veracity of even the most banal thing, so heavy-handed and familiar is the style that describes it. Which is how Smith gets us to assent to the central conceit of her novel: that one evening, in between the main and dessert courses of a dinner party in Greenwich, a pleasant and thoughtful man named Miles Garth, hitherto unknown to the hosts, goes upstairs, locks himself in the spare bedroom, and refuses to budge, or communicate. For months. This will remind you of Smith's previous There But for the but one, The Accidentalin which the life of a middle-class family is also interrupted by an unexpected outsider. There the influence is malign; here, benign, relatively: Miles's presence is taken by the outward world as some kind of noble gran rifiutoor the enactment of Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" the words occur in the novel, so we're meant to think of him. A sort of Occupy camp, complete with oddballs, springs up outside the Greenwich house. The lady of the house does an " Experience " column for the Guardian you know the one — it's in the magazine. The novel then splits into four: each section is narrated from the mind of four people whose lives have, in some way, been touched by Miles: a woman he met as a teenager on a European trip 30 years before; the man There But for the invited There But for the to the dinner party in the first place, There But for the year-old picture researcher who is gay; the grandmother of a girl who died when she was 16 who used to sort-of-go-out-with the young Miles; and the year-old daughter of another couple who went to the same dinner party, significantly black, and clever and, if you are not in the mood for puns, rather irritating. It turns out she is the originator of the "The fact is" opening gambit. In terms of technique, Smith is a master of what one reviewer has felicitously called "dropped stitches", deliberate There But for the in the story, little scootings-off to the side, connections that don't quite connect and apparent non-connections that do. This is great, and which is why I am pleased she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. But the dinner party … would anyone, however stupid, ask, inan obviously educated black couple with Yorkshire accents if they'd ever seen any tigers "where [they] came from"? Dinner parties are awful, I know that, and you can find some prize creeps at them, but this strains credulity somewhat. Nicholas Lezard's choice Books. There but for the by Ali Smith - review.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Complexities of Dwelling 1 Ben Davies, the Complexities Of
    Complexities of Dwelling 1 Ben Davies, The Complexities of Dwelling in Ali Smith’s There but for the Abstract This article offers a sustained exploration of dwelling in Ali Smith’s There but for the. Focusing on the way the character Miles locks himself into a family’s bedroom, I argue that this move transforms a “spare” room into a significant gathering place. As part of his disruptive move, Miles also removes himself from dominant forms of activity and productivity, thereby offering an image of dwelling that is not motivated by capitalist routines of labour and profit. More abstractly, Miles’ form of dwelling opens up a space for thought; both characters and readers are invited to “take the measure” of Miles’ dwelling, as well as their own. Correlatively, the text is an intricate dwelling space, offering an important and challenging phenomenological invitation to the reader to dwell within and upon the relationship between language, space, time and thought; the text invites the reader to think about dwelling and being in contemporary society. Keywords: dwelling, language, space, time, reading, Ali Smith, There but for the Author Note: Ben Davies is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction: Exceptional Intercourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and the co-editor of Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Complexities of Dwelling 2 Towards the beginning of his essay “‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’” (1954), Martin Heidegger states: “our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage. Even if that were not so, our dwelling today is harassed by work, made insecure by the hunt for gain and success, bewitched by the entertainment and recreation industry” (211).
    [Show full text]
  • The Interminable Tapeworm Time Perception and Stream of Consciousness in Ali Smith’S Fiction
    Gezels !1 Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy The Interminable Tapeworm Time Perception and Stream of Consciousness in Ali Smith’s Fiction Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial fulfillment Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens of the requirements for the degree “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde, Engels-Nederlands” by Helena Gezels December 2016 Gezels !2 Acknowledgments Thank you to professor Buelens for rejecting my first thesis idea, which luckily lead me to consider Ali Smith as a topic; I thank him for his advice and his guidance, his skepticism and his support. Secondly, thank you to Kate for agreeing to (proof)read this for me and taking away some of my fears and insecurities by sharing her experiences with this thesis writing. Finally, thank you to Ali Smith herself, for never ceasing to be a source of inspiration and amazement. Gezels !3 Table of contents Introduction 4 Chapter 1: A theory of mind and time 7 1. Founding fathers: Henri Bergson and internal time 7 2. Time in the novel 10 2.1 Fictional knowledge: the novel in time 10 2.2 A methodology for internal time analysis 12 3. Stream of consciousness as a style 17 3.1 What is stream of consciousness? 17 3.2 Stream of consciousness: narratological techniques 19 3.3 Stream of consciousness: rhetorical techniques 25 Chapter 2: Time in Ali Smith’s fiction 28 1. On the outside: time as a theme 28 1.1 Structure 29 1.2 Symbolism 36 2. On the inside: modes of internal time 43 2.1 The Kinetic Mode 43 2.2 The Time-dimension Mode 46 2.3 The Mnemonic Mode 49 Chapter 3: Stream of Consciousness 53 1.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Ali Smith Ali Smith's Fiction Demands of Its Reader Some Basic
    Ali Smith Ali Smith’s fiction demands of its reader some basic requirements. Firstly, one must be the bearer of a sense of humour, and, if possible, a sense of the ludicrous, for we are everywhere treated to a stream of in-jokes and puns that reflect their author’s fondness for both whimsy and surreality. Secondly, one must give up any reliance on the conventions of narrative realism for though her works are often explicitly set in recognisably contemporary worlds, they rarely limit themselves to the visible parameters of social reality, preferring audacious imaginative flight over intricate description or plot trajectory. Finally, one needs to tune emotionally to the pitch of writing that while fearsomely clever is also hauntingly affecting. Smith does not manipulatively wring from her reader an emotional reaction to the heart-breaking concerns with loss, vulnerability, grief, and loneliness about which she often writes, rather through echoes and associations one comes obliquely to appreciate and empathise with the difficult work of being human that Smith captures. Armed with these prerequisites the reader can feel prepared to tackle one of the most innovative, thoughtful, and witty writers of her generation. Alison Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland on 24th August 1962 to an English father, who was an electrician, and a mother from the very north of Ireland, who worked as a bus conductress. The last of five children, Smith recalls a happy childhood but one in which she, as the youngest by seven years, spent much time amusing herself. She learned to read at the age of three and had devoured her siblings’ book collections before her teenage years.
    [Show full text]
  • Ali Smith and Ovid
    International Journal of the Classical Tradition https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00511-9 ARTICLE Ali Smith and Ovid Holly Ranger1 © The Author(s) 2019 In her Sebald Lecture for the British Centre of Literary Translation, Scottish author Ali Smith invoked Ovid to describe the simultaneous perils and delights encoun- tered when using the online tool Google Translate. She noted that the software ‘is not an Ovidian god … [although it ofers] the kind of pleasure that a writer like Ovid would surely have understood’; and on the conversion of Salman Rushdie to Salmon Residue by her computer’s spellcheck function, she joked that both Ovid and twenty-frst century electronic word processing programs remind us that ‘lan- guage can change us … even into another species’.1 Despite the extent and depth of Smith’s engagement with Ovid, few critics have pursued the link between the two writers, and fewer still have considered how Ovid crucially informs her oeuvre.2 The central focus of this essay is the many and varied efects of Ovid’s presence in three novels: Like (1997), Girl Meets Boy (2007) and How To Be Both (2014). Throughout interviews, public talks, and essays, the Roman poet is an abiding concern for Ali Smith. Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she 1 A. Smith, ‘Loosed in Translation’, 2011 Sebald Lecture, British Centre for Literary Translation, Kings Place, London, 31 January 2011. Available at: http://www.bclt.org.uk/event s/sebal d-lectu re/sebal d-lectu re-2011 [accessed 17 February 2017]. My sincere thanks are extended to Tessa Roynon, who read earlier versions of this manuscript, and whose generosity and critical insight as an editor is acknowledged with gratitude.
    [Show full text]
  • Autumn Novel
    By the same author Free Love 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 Shire How to be both Public library and other stories This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2016 by Ali Smith All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2016. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Pan Books: Excerpt from Talking to Women by Nell Dunn, copyright © 1966 by Nell Dunn. Reprinted by permission of Pan Books. Penguin Books Ltd.: Excerpt from Metamorphosis by Ovid, translated by Mary M. Innes. Copyright © 1995 by Mary M. Innes. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Wolverhampton Art Gallery & Museums: Excerpt from Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman by Sue Tate, copyright © 2013 by Sue Tate. Reprinted by permission of Wolverhampton Art Gallery & Museums. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Smith, Ali, [date] author. Title: Autumn / Ali Smith. Description: New York : Pantheon Books, [2017] Identifiers: LCCN 2016036972 (print).
    [Show full text]
  • Dp - Ali Smith.Pdf
    Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Kateřina Štruncová Love, Alienation and Identity in Ali Smith’s Novels Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2013 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for introducing me to the breathtaking world of Ali Smith’s novels and for her kindness and helpful guidance. Table of Contents 1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 2 Like …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4 3 Girl Meets Boy …………………………………………………………………………………………… 15 4 The Accidental …………………………………………………………………………………………… 25 5 Hotel World ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 38 6 There But For The ……………………………………………………………………………………… 48 7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 57 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 59 Czech Resume ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 64 English Resume ………………………………………………………………………………………………65 1 Introduction This thesis analyzes the work of a Scottish writer Ali Smith, in particular all of her five novels that were published so far. Smith was born in Inverness in 1962, the fifth of five children. After school, Smith went to university at Aberdeen, then to Cambridge to study for a PhD, which she has never finished. After she gave up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde, she began writing short stories and novels. Smith, openly gay, currently lives in Cambridge and avoids publicity. She says that she has always believed that an author must remain as anonymous as possible or risk impeding the fiction for her readers. Too much biographical information “diminishes the thing that you do” she says. “You have to remain invisible” (qtd.
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae
    1 CURRICULUM VITAE Fiona McCulloch Nationality: Scottish EDUCATION 1998 PhD English Literature, University of Liverpool. Thesis title: ‘“Child’s Play”: Performing Childhood in Victorian and Early Twentieth Century Children’s Literature’ 1994 MA (Single Hons) English Literature, University of Dundee EMPLOYMENT Jan. 2015 – May 2015 Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professor Department of English University of Connecticut A Full Professor visiting appointment, where I will be teaching a graduate course: ‘Contemporary Scottish Women’s Fiction and Cosmopolitanism’ and an undergraduate course: ‘Contemporary British Children’s Fiction’, and delivering a public inaugural lecture. Jan. 2010 – Jan. 2014 Director of English School of Social and International Studies (SSIS), University of Bradford Design and development of Children’s Fiction; Imagined Identities in British Literature; Sexuality and Identity in Literature; Colonial to Cosmopolitan Fiction; Victorian Literature; Study Skills for English Literature; Dissertation Workshop (See Teaching Dossier). Internal examiner for a PhD thesis on Gender Performance in Shakespeare. I was part of a supervisory team for a PhD student in Machine Anthropomorphism in Children’s Fiction. Administrative and pastoral duties relating to my taught modules. Administrative duties relating to Programme Director role in English. Admissions tutor for English, including attendance at Open Days, Visit Days and Clearing. I discussed English Literature at a Teachers and Trainers Conference at the University of Bradford in June 2012. I significantly improved the National Student Survey 2013 (NSS) statistics for English, so that, for instance, it scored second top for Personal Development (95.8%) in University of Bradford’s Departmental Rank. I also helped to vastly improve student performance, so that 2 English had the best pass and proceed rate in the Division of Peace Studies.
    [Show full text]
  • Artful Connections: Ways of Looking At/In Ali Smith's How to Be Both
    Reading Scotland: Artful Connections: Ways of Looking at/in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both Wolfgang Funk 12 January 2021 Outline Introductions – Ali Smith – How to Be Both: The Basics (Genre, Plotlines, Settings…) Aspects for Analysis – Both What? – Connections – Ekphrasis and Post(?)-Postmodernism Questions and Discussion Ali Smith • Born in Inverness 1962 • “Scotland’s Nobel laureate- in-waiting” (Sebastian Barry) • Important Works – The Accidental (2005) – There But For The (2011) – Artful (2012) – ‘4-Seasons Tetralogy’ (2016-20) e13f66e7-fc67-4175-8130-e82479213d58.webp Ali Smith • Born in Inverness 1962 • “Scotland’s Nobel laureate- in-waiting” (Sebastian Barry) • Important Works – The Accidental (2005) – There But For The (2011) – Artful (2012) – ‘4-Seasons Tetralogy’ (2016-20) How to Be Both (2014) Winner of Goldsmiths Prize Baileys Women’s Prize Costa Book Award (Novel) Shortlisted Man Booker Folio Prize Reviews • “The sheer inventive power of her new novel pulls you through, gasping, to the final page.” (The Observer) • “How to be Both shows us that the arrangement of a story, even when it's the same story, can change our understanding of it and define our emotional attachments. We may have known this, but to see it enacted with such imagination is dazzling indeed.” (The Independent) • “How to be Both brims with palpable joy, not only at language, literature, and art’s transformative power […]. With great subtlety and inventiveness, Smith continues to expand the boundaries of the novel.” (The Daily Telegraph) The Basics • Inspiration/Reception • Genre/Publication • Plots and Settings • Characters One day in April 2013, I saw a picture. The picture was in the art magazine Frieze and I was flicking through it having my breakfast coffee.
    [Show full text]
  • The Agency of Characters Who Read in the Fiction of Ali Smith
    ‘LEAV(ING) ROOM FOR THE READER’: THE AGENCY OF CHARACTERS WHO READ IN THE FICTION OF ALI SMITH Jessica Orr A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 2019 Full metadata for this thesis is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this thesis: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18826 This item is protected by original copyright This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 ‘Leav(ing) Room for the Reader’: The Agency of Characters who Read in the Fiction of Ali Smith Jessica Orr This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the University of St Andrews June 2019 Candidate's declaration I, Jessica Orr, do hereby certify that this thesis, submitted for the degree of PhD, which is approximately 79,778 words in length, has been written by me, and that it is the record of work carried out by me, or principally by myself in collaboration with others as acknowledged, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for any degree. I was admitted as a research student at the University of St Andrews in September 2015. I received funding from an organisation or institution and have acknowledged the funder(s) in the full text of my thesis. Date Signature of candidate Supervisor's declaration I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of the Resolution and Regulations appropriate for the degree of PhD in the University of St Andrews and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree.
    [Show full text]
  • Nights of Cabiria
    2017 | Swedenborg Film Festival Nights of Cabiria Federico Fellini (1957, 113 mins) a screening as part of the Swedenborg Film Festival 2017 with Ali Smith Thursday 9 November 2017 | 6.30 pm for 7.00 pm start FREE ADMISSION Follow us: swedenborg.soc @swedenborghouse ‘the unforgettable Cabiria is a tiny, scrappy survivor who drifts almost magically among the film’s varied realms. In three astonishing long sequences here, she is taken under the wing of a movie star, disillusioned @SwedSoc by a religious pilgrimage with carnival overtones and cruelly tricked by a hypnotist who exposes her once-secret dreams…a deep, wrenching and #SFF eloquent filmgoing experience.’—The New York Times THE 2017 SWEDENBORG FILM FESTIVAL explores the theme of ‘dreams’, with a season of iconic features and visionary shorts chosen by the writer Ali Smith. With free admission, the screenings take place in the grade II-listed Swedenborg Hall at the heart of Bloomsbury. — TIME: 7:00 - 9:00 pm Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and one of today’s most significant and original storytellers, Smith has curated a season of films—from rarely seen cinematic masterpieces — DATE: 9 November 2017 to contemporary artist shorts—all questioning boundaries between imagination and — ADMISSION: Free reality, performance and identity. Smith is also guest judge of the annual Swedenborg (but book in advance) Short Film competition, featuring international artists with new moving image works responding to the theme of ‘dreams’. The festival will conclude with the screening of the — VENUE: 2017 shortlist and Smith’s announcement of the winner. Swedenborg Hall 20/21 Bloomsbury Way THE SWEDENBORG SHORT FESTIVAL is curated by Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery) and Nora London WC1A 2TH Foster (Frieze).
    [Show full text]
  • AUTUMN by Ali Smith (Facts)
    AUTUMN by Ali Smith (Facts) Name of the teacher:Neethu P.C Subject: 21st Century Literature Academic year:2020-2021 Ali Smith (born 24 August 1962) is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting". Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, Ali Smith's Booker Prize- shortlisted, bestselling Seasonal Quartet, is a series of four stand- alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide- ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, which, when taken together, give us something more—all four united by the passing of time, the timing of narrative, and the endless familiarity yet renewal that the cycle of the seasons is. Autumn is a 2016 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton. It is the first of four seasonal ‘state of the nation’ works. Written rapidly after the United Kingdom's 2016 European Union membership referendum, it was widely regarded as the first 'post-Brexit novel' dealing with the issues raised by the voters' decision.[1][2][3] In July 2017, Autumn was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and in September 2017 it was announced as one of six books to make the shortlist.[4][5] Many newspapers viewed it as the most likely candidate for winning. The book was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 Other works: There But For The (2011), cited by the Guardian book review as one of the best novels of the year.[16] How to Be Both (2014), shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize,[17] the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (winner),[18] and the Folio Prize.
    [Show full text]
  • A Celebration of Our Existence,” (Clark, Par
    A CELEBRATION OF The reception of two novels by Ali Smith as OUR EXISTENCE “modernist” BA Thesis | Student: Meike Kersten | Student number: s4226674 Supervisor: Dr Dennis Kersten | Second reader: Dr Chris Louttit 12/06/2015 Kersten s4226674/1 Abstract with keywords Abstract Reviews of various contemporary British novels contain distinctive characteristics associated with modernism as well as direct references to the literary movement or the historical period. The reception of Ali Smith’s two latest novels proves that modernism is anything but outmoded. What aspects of Ali Smith’s There but for the (2011) and How to be both (2014) are emphasised when reviews of these novels contain references to modernism? Five reviews published by the established press are analysed per novel to find out why exactly these novels are received as modernist fiction. The results of the analyses reveal how the reviewers shape their definition of modernism in their reception of these novels. The choice for the label “modernism” suggests that it is a generic term for a number of characteristics rather than a movement, and that it adds cultural value to a text. Connecting contemporary fiction with modernism, this thesis brings together two seemingly unrelated fields of study very relevant to our times. Keywords reviews, contemporary British novel, modernist, modernism, Ali Smith, received, reception, fiction, aspects, references, established press, definition, labels Kersten s4226674/2 Table of contents Introduction 3 Chapter One: Reviews of There but for the 11 Chapter Two: Reviews of How to be both 23 Conclusion 35 Works Cited 38 Kersten s4226674/3 Introduction Once upon a time, a long time ago, the future was modern, or at least modernist.
    [Show full text]