 First edition | |
| Author | Ali Smith |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton |
| ISBN | 9780241145401 |
Artful is a 2012 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith and published by Hamish Hamilton. It was shortlisted for the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013. [1]
| First edition | |
| Author | Ali Smith |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton |
| ISBN | 9780241145401 |
Artful is a 2012 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith and published by Hamish Hamilton. It was shortlisted for the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013. [1]
This book is based on four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University, the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature. [2] The four headings are: "On Time", "On Form", "On Edge", and "On Offer and On Reflection".
It has two fictional characters. One is a woman mourning her dead lover and the other is her dead lover who still seems to be present. She speaks to the mourning woman in Greek, steals belongings, and causes a nuisance. The dead woman was working on some lectures when she died, and the living one works with trees.
The English author and critic Julie Myerson wrote in the Guardian that "if this book has a central subject, it's the relationship between thought and art".
Smith explores different artists throughout the book including the surrealists, William Shakespeare, and Jackie Kay. [3]
The Independent called the novel "smart, allusive, informal, playful, and audacious". [4]
Julie Myerson in The Guardian said the novel is "a seductive and compelling case for the power of imagination. Or – to go back to Dickens – a gorgeous and artfully dodging work of "shifting possibility". Or, in the words of Katherine Mansfield who, on finishing DH Lawrence's Aaron's Rod , compared it to a tree "firmly planted, deep thrusting, outspread, growing grandly, alive in every twig. All the time I read this book I felt it was feeding me." Back to trees, then, a perfect leitmotif for the unstoppable nourishment of literature. And there is food and substance in this wonderful, deeply original book." [3]
Leah Hager Cohen in The New York Times said "A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. And her new book, in which she tugs at God’s sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner." [5]
The Song of Songs, also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is an erotic poem, one of the five megillot ("scrolls") in the Ketuvim ("writings"), the last section of the Tanakh. It is unique within the Hebrew Bible: it shows no interest in Law or Covenant or the God of Israel, nor does it teach or explore wisdom, like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes ; instead, it celebrates sexual love, giving "the voices of two lovers, praising each other, yearning for each other, proffering invitations to enjoy".
Julie Myerson is an English author and critic. As well as fiction and non-fiction books, she formerly wrote a column in The Guardian entitled "Living with Teenagers", based on her family experiences. She appeared regularly as a panellist on the arts programme Newsnight Review.
The Poisonwood Bible (1998), by Barbara Kingsolver, is a best-selling novel about a missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 move from the U.S. state of Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo, close to the Kwilu River.
Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.
Helen Oyeyemi FRSL is a British novelist and writer of short stories.
Amanda Hager is a writer of fiction and non-fiction for children, young adults and adults. Many of her books have been shortlisted for or won awards, including Singing Home the Whale which won both the Young Adult fiction category and the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2015. She has been the recipient of several fellowships, residencies and prizes, including the Beatson Fellowship in 2012, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 2014, the Waikato University Writer in Residence in 2015 and the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award in 2019.
Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".
A mistress is a woman who is in a relatively long-term sexual and romantic relationship with someone who is married to a different person.
Barbara Nadel is an English crime-writer. Many of her books are set in Turkey, others in London's East End. She is best known for her Istanbul-set Çetin İkmen novels.
Almanac of the Dead is the second novel by Leslie Marmon Silko, first published in 1991.
Leah Hager Cohen is an American author who writes both fiction and nonfiction.
Run is a 2007 novel by American author Ann Patchett. It was her first novel after the widely successful Bel Canto (2001).
The Last Girl is the first novel of English author Stephan Collishaw. It tells the story of an elderly poet living in Vilnius in the 1990s, who is troubled by a guilty secret from his youth. The novel is set partly in 1990s Vilnius and partly in war time Wilno and deals with the holocaust in Lithuania.
There But For The is a 2011 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton and in the US by Pantheon, and set in 2009 and 2010 in Greenwich, London. It was cited by both The Guardian book review and the Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year. and was also longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Home is the tenth novel by the American author Toni Morrison, originally published in 2012 by Alfred A. Knopf. Set in the 1950’s, Morrison's Home rewrites the narrative of the time period. The novel tells the story of 24-year-old war veteran Frank Money as he navigates America amidst his trauma from serving in the Korean War. After receiving a letter that alerts him of the danger his younger sister, Cee, has found herself in, he sets out on a journey back home to Lotus, Georgia.
The Goldsmiths Prize is a British literary award, founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman. It is awarded annually to a piece of fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form." It is limited to citizens and residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to novels published by presses based in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner receives £10,000. Tim Parnell of the Goldsmiths English department conceived and runs the prize, inspired by his research into Laurence Sterne and other eighteenth-century writers, like Denis Diderot, who experimented with the novel form. The prize "casts its net wider than most other prizes" and intends to celebrate "creative daring," but resists the phrase "experimental fiction," because it implies "an eccentric deviation from the novel’s natural concerns, structures and idioms." To date, Rachel Cusk is the author best represented on the prize's shortlists, having been shortlisted for each book of her Outline trilogy.
NW is a 2012 novel by British author Zadie Smith. It takes its title from the NW postcode area in North-West London, where the novel is set. The novel is experimental and follows four different characters living in London, shifting between first and third person, stream-of-consciousness, screenplay-style dialogue, and other narrative techniques in an attempt to reflect the polyphonic nature of contemporary, urban life. It was nominated for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction.
From A to X is a novel written by John Berger, published by Verso Books in 2008. It is a story about love, being suppressed by an authoritative totalitarianism in a fictional country. Features from military setting are included, as well as medical and pharmaceutical terms, since the two main characters are Xavier, who has been imprisoned and given two life sentences, and A'ida, a young pharmacist and Xavier's lover.
How to Be Both is a 2014 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 Folio Prize. It won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards and the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
The Unknown Bridesmaid is a 2013 novel by English novelist Margaret Forster published by Chatto & Windus.