Artful - Hardcover

Smith, Ali

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670066389 ISBN 13: 9780670066384

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2013

Synopsis

 The incomparable Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives

A book that refuses to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, 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, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a diction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.

Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form from ancient cave painting to 1960’s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights-on the relations of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.

About this title

About the Author:

Ali Smith is the author of nine works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her story collections include Free Love and The Whole Story and Other Stories. Her most recent novel, There But For The, was named one of The Guardian's Best Books of 2011 and NPR's Five 2011 Books That Stay with You. Born in Inverness, Scotland, Smith now lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

From Booklist:

As author of the 2012 Weidenfeld Lectures on Comparative Literature, Smith finds inspiration in Milosz’s conviction that “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.” Indeed, Smith daringly splits herself into two captivating voices: that of a Dickens-loving bibliophile and that of her former lover’s ghost. Because that ghost shares the bibliophile’s passion for literature, the dialogue evolves into a wide-ranging reflection on how novelists invent reality, how poets cross-fertilize the literary flowers of their predecessors, how filmmakers transform the screen into a dream that absorbs their audience. As unpredictable as an undead vagrant, this scintillating conversation showcases Smith’s own gifts as a creative writer. But it also reminds readers of how great literature—of Shakespeare, Lawrence, Hopkins, Ovid, Plath, Rilke, and Flaubert—requires them to reorient their line of vision. Nothing—Smith shows her reader—forces such reorientation more than violating conventional boundaries, often in dangerous ways. These most unlecture-like of lectures deliver the thrill of perilous border crossings. --Bryce Christensen

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0670066389
• ISBN 13: 9780670066384
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256