Public Library and other Stories by Ali Smith (2015)

My Posts on Ali Smith 

Ali Smith is a onsistently highly interesting writer. Over the last few years I have read and 

posted on several of her short stories as well as her masterful lecture series Artful  I was happy when the publisher of her latest collection offered me a review copy of Public Library and other Stories. 

The collection was assembled in part in response to the recent closing in the U.K of many public libraries, done by the government in an effort to save money.  Interspersed with the stories are accounts of British authors about what free public libraries have meant to them.  As I reside in city of ten million or so with the world's biggest malls but with no public libraries I found these memoirs very  moving.  

One of the reasons I enjoyed this collection was in almost every story the reading lives of the characters is a central aspect of the story.  One character talks about the great World War One Poet Winfred Owen with her late father. Katherine Mansfield comes into play several times.  

This is a very  good worthwhile collection of short stories. The stories about libraries are very moving.

ALI SMITH is the author of ten previous works of fiction. Three of her novels—Hotel World, The Accidental, and How to be both—have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. How to be both won the Costa Novel Award, the Baileys Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Saltire Literary Book of the Year Award. Her story collections include Free Love, which won a Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.

Mel u

"The Beholder" by Ali Smith

March 1 to March 31

A Reading Life Special Post

"The Beholder" by Ali Smith

You participation in ISSM3 (which I am open to extending until April 7 to get all the Q and A Sessions properly done) is invited and desired.  E Mail me if you are interested.  

Yesterday I did a post on the Sunday Times short story award winning work, "Miss Lorca" by Junot Diaz. (My post is here.)  This is the biggest prize for a short story in the world at 30,000 Pounds.  Last year Ireland's Kevin Barry won.   I included the post within the framework of Irish Short Story week as Diaz is the very epitome of a literary success story and his work will serve as role model for countless other writers.   There were five other short stories short listed for this prize.   All of the other stories are by British writers and they are published in a fairly prize Kindle book.   The other writers are all English, not an Irish writer made the cut this year.  Nevertheless, these stories are what publishers want, what big name judges feel are the best of short stories and they will serve as role models, admit it or not, for many aspiring Irish short story writers.   I mean who would not want to win the prize and enjoy the literary super-star status of Junot Diaz or Kevin Barry.   Short story styles go in an out of fashion and I guess these stories are the trend setters at least this month.

Ali Smith is one of my favorite contemporary short story writers.   I really like a lot her "True Story Short".  In addition to that I have posted on two other of her short stories and her series of meta-fiction lecture given at Oxford, Artful.  In fact I took a line from "True Story Short" and incorporated it into some of the Q and A Sessions with Irish writers this month when I asked them if this line from the story makes sense to them "Is the short story a goddess and nymph and is the novel an old whore?"


"The Beholder" is a very interesting story which combines elements of magic realism with a story about a medical mystery.

A woman has a strange growth on her chest.  The doctors do not really know what it might be.  Of course it could be cancer so they send her for a lot of tests.

She meets a Gypsy in the park one day (lot of Gypsies in older Irish stories, gypsies are often confused by the ill-informed with Travellers, who tells her, without seeing it that she has a nice licitness growing on her chest and to be sure and water it.   She also takes all of her money, the doctors would get it any way.

Now the story gets real weird.  Here is her conversation with the gypsy:

"I think that may well be a very nice specimen you’ve got there in your chest, if I’m not wrong, a young licitness. A young what? I said but a couple of community police officers were strolling up the street towards us and she was busy tucking away her sprigs of heather into her many coat pockets, in fact it looked like her coat was more pocket than coat. Give it a few hours of sun every day if you can, she called back over her shoulder as she went, stay well"

Did I tell you thinks were getting strange.  It turns out what she has growing on her chest is a rose named after Milton's "Lycidas".   At times it seems the woman is almost changing into a rose bush or perhaps that is what she always was.

This was an interesting story, will make you go "humm" but of this and "Miss Lora" if I were a judge I would go with Diaz on this.  

Author Data

Ali Smith was born in Inverness, studied at Aberdeen and Cambridge universities and lives in Cambridge. She’s been writing novels, stories, plays and occasional journalism since 1995. Her most recent books are Artful (2012), a work of melded fiction and essay based on a series of talks she gave at St Anne’s College, Oxford in 2012 as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of Comparative European Literature, and There But For The (2011), which won the Hawthornden Prize and SMIT Best Scottish Fiction Award.

There are four other stories in the collection for 2013 and I plan to post on the other four soon.  For sheer fun I will rank them.

So far

1.  Diaz
2.  Smith

If you have read any of these stories please share your thoughts with us


Mel u

Artful by Ali Smith

Artful by Ali Smith  (2013, 256 pages)

"Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced more by books than by writers; they're a result of the books that went before them.  Great books are adaptable;  they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives"

Artful is based on four lectures Ali Smith gave at Oxford University.    The lectures were done in a unique format as if someone had discovered essays on art and fiction written by former lover who haunts you.   I really loved Ali Smith's short stories, especially "True Short Story" where there is a lot of material on the nature of the short story.  When I saw these essays as forthcoming on Amazon I knew I really wanted to read them.   There is much that is marvelous in these wonderful essays.   Smith loves the short story and there is a lot to learn about the form in this book, along with much more.

Last year as I read articles on the short story by William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen who both said the short story was the newest literary form.  I thought who am I to contradict them but every fiber I had
screamed "totally wrong, they are the oldest form".   I was so happy to see Smith agree with this and talking about ancient works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh as pieced together short stories and even talking about cave paintings as being inspired by short stories.   I felt a shiver when she talked of countless literatures of the past lost to us.    I talked about his in my post The Reading Life Guide to Getting Started in the Indian Short Story.

Smith talks about why we need art and the limitations and reach of short stories.  She organizes her lectures around four themes,  "On Time", "On Form", "On Edge", and "On Offer and Reflection".   I do not think there is an "Ali Smith doctrine" in these lectures, she is artist  and a lover of the short story, not really a formal theoretician or academic (thankfully!)    The greatness of these lectures, and they are marvels, is in the many wonderful things she says that make you ponder if you agree or not.   There are lots of really interesting reading ideas here also.  She talks about a lot of things here you I really enjoyed reading such as Charlie Chaplain films, Nate King Cole, and she spends a lot of time talking about Oliver Twist.  My mind was opened up to a new way of looking at the book by what she says about the Artful Dodger and Fagin.

She talks about the greats of literature:  Ovid, Rilke, Flaubert and Shakespeare.  I was so happy to see she loved Katherine Mansfield.  She made me think of Mansfield as a writer on the margins and I reflected that Smith is probably right when she said Mansfield is still on the margins of the literary canon of modernism.

The entire essay contains simply wonderful utterances any one who loves reading or books (not the same thing) will relish reading and at times feel Smith is articulating what they feel but cannot express.

There is enough in this line for a dozen huge books:  "Walter Benjamin says that's where the storyteller's authority comes from, death."   I have begun to do word counts on some of the works you read and so far if you scan a 400 page collection of short stories and a 400 page novel for terms like "death" and "love" they come up more more often in the short stories.

Artful by Ali Smith is a challenging book, both in understanding what she is saying and it trying to incorporate her knowledge within your own.    This not an academic presentation of facts to help you pass your orals.  It is a wonderful work of art, almost a new art form.  There just is so much to like and learn from in these essays.  I think one could read them many times with pleasure and profit.

Two Really Good Ali Smith Short Stories About Talking to Children

"The Child" (16 pages, 2008)
"The First Person"  (15 pages, 2008)

Last month I read and  posted on two short stories by Ali Smith (UK, 1962), "True short story
and "The Universal Story".    I totally loved these stories, especially the first one that deals with the nature of the short story, and said I wanted to read more of her work.   This morning I read two delightful stories, both dealing in very different ways about how challenging it can be for adults to communicate with children.  One of them, "The First Person" brilliantly depicts a 44 year old  woman having an actual conversation with her 14 year old self.   The second is a very surreal story about a woman who leaves her shopping cart in the market to go to another aisle and returns to find a one year old baby in her cart.

"The Child" is a very strange quite surreal story.   A single woman in her early twenties is shopping in a supermarket.  She leaves her cart  just to go get some milk and when she returns there is a one year old baby in the toddler seat in the cart.   At first she figures someone just put the baby  in the wrong cart and if she waits a second a panicked mother will retrieve the child, who she thinks is a boy.  But no one does, so she goes to the store office to see if anyone has reported a missing child and no one has.  The store announces over the loud speaker that there is a lost baby in the office but no one claims him.   The woman does not know what to do.    Then she thinks OK I will take the baby to the police station and they will know what to do with him.  The she gets confused over what to do as she does not want to be accused of being a baby snatcher.   Now things get much weirder when she hears a voice from the back of the car, where she had put the baby.  "You're really a rubbish driver, a voice said from the back of the car.  I could do better than that, and I can't even drive".  It was the baby speaking.   The baby spoke complicated words with an innocence that "sounded ancient, centuries old, and at the same time as if it had only just discovered their meaning and was out their usage and I was privileged to be present when it did.".   I hope you will be able to read this really good story so I will leave the ending untold.  I think one could talk for a long time  about this story without exhausting it.

"The First Person" is a story for anyone who has ever wished they could somehow go back in time and give their teenage self some advise.   In this totally fun really well done story that is exactly what happens.   The story captures perfectly well the difficulty of communicating with teenagers, in this case a girl, and the very real longing of the woman in the story to have known at 14 the things she knows now.

Both of these stories are from the collection The First Person and other Stories.  

Author Data

Ali Smith (born 1962 in Inverness) is a British writer. She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that was never finished. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with CFS/ME. Following this she became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement. Openly gay, she lives in Cambridge with her partner Sarah Wood. In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Ali Smith knows a lot about the short story, more than just how to write a good one.  I have on pre-order Artful a series of four lectures Smith gave at Oxford on art and literature.