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Public Library and Other Stories
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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2016
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Description
From the acclaimed, award-winning author: Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we’ve read over our lives—our own personal libraries—make of us? What does the unraveling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us?
The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.
Woven between the stories are conversations with writers and readers reflecting on the essential role that libraries have played in their lives. At a time when public libraries around the world face threats of cuts and closures, this collection stands as a work of literary activism—and as a wonderful read from one of our finest authors.
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Street Date:
10/04/2016
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781101973059
ASIN:
B01AQO162K
Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Ali Smith. (2016). Public Library and Other Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Ali Smith. 2016. Public Library and Other Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Ali Smith, Public Library and Other Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Ali Smith. Public Library and Other Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 03, 2017 06:19:33
Date Updated:
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      • bioText: ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Summer, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public Library and Other Stories, and How to Be Both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has been shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.
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title
Public Library and Other Stories
fullDescription
From the acclaimed, award-winning author: Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we’ve read over our lives—our own personal libraries—make of us? What does the unraveling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us?
The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.
Woven between the stories are conversations with writers and readers reflecting on the essential role that libraries have played in their lives. At a time when public libraries around the world face threats of cuts and closures, this collection stands as a work of literary activism—and as a wonderful read from one of our finest authors.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: The Times (London)
      • content: "Thank goodness for Ali Smith, for who else could write a short story collection about libraries and make it wild."
      • premium: False
      • source: Mary Beard, The Guardian (Best Books of the Year)
      • content: "A series of wonderful stories on the power of books."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Times Literary Supplement (London)
      • content: "Extraordinarily artful. . . . A triumph."
      • premium: False
      • source: Financial Times
      • content: "Smith's own stories leap across space and time, delighting in unexpected connections. . . . Each of Smith's stories is a gem."
      • premium: False
      • source: Ian Samson, The Guardian (London)
      • content: "A work of endless interventions. . . . Smith's great talent is her ability to produce on the page the effect of a human voice."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Independent (Books of the Year)
      • content: "An important book."
      • premium: False
      • source: Daily Mail
      • content: "Superb. . . . [A] wonderful collection. . . . It has been Smith's unlikely triumph throughout her increasingly acclaimed career to combine a playful and experimental approach with material that is both moving and funny--and she has done it again."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Herald (Glasgow)
      • content: "There are sentences that sing, or make you smile, and the conceit behind each of the stories is distinctively offbeat."
      • premium: False
      • source: Mail on Sunday (London)
      • content: "Spritely, poignant. . . . Magical. . . . Alive to the ability words have to garland a life and make the ordinary bloom into something fresh and funny."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        August 29, 2016
        Smith���s (How to Be Both) collection celebrates the communal impact of books through a breezy series of slice-of-life tales that highlight the casual inroads of life and literature, pairing ordinary readers with the writing that has shaped them. In ���Good Voice,��� a book of poems by the WWI poet Wilfred Owen is the conduit between a girl and the memory of her veteran father. ���The Poet��� is a microbiography of the Scottish poet Olive Fraser that notes how the minutiae of her troubled life is captured in her Keatsian stanzas. ���The Human Claim��� is a long meditation on the fate of D.H. Lawrence���s ashes. ���Last��� records a passing moment on a train between a woman and a commuter with a head full of Greek etymologies. Other stories feature a doctor���s visit informed by Milton, a reconstruction of the life of the singer Dusty Springfield, and two ex-spouses recalling their relationship through encounters with the word sepulchral. Each of these is followed by a recollection by one of Smith���s peers about their memories of public libraries, significant because this book appeared in the U.K. amid a tense battle over massive cuts to library funding. Smith���s book is certainly precious, but its earnestness and certainty that we are the sum of what we read is affecting and well-taken. This is a valiant project that depicts the everyday joy of books and makes a passionate plea for their preservation.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        An engaging collection of stories that explore how people are connected by words, ideas, events, and memories and, not coincidentally, how those connections may be lost when public libraries are closed.Scottish writer Smith (How to Be Both, 2014, etc.) notes that U.K. budget cuts threaten to close as many as 1,000 public libraries. She describes her latest book as one "that celebrates the communal impact on us of books and of reading." That is clearly the case in the italicized sections between the stories, in which writers and others say what public libraries have meant to them. The thematic resonance of the stories is subtler. The opener, "Last," observes a handicapped woman accidentally trapped on a train through the eyes of a narrator whose mind wanders to the etymologies of "buxom," "stamina," "clue," and other words, to thoughts of her childhood and pressing many-leaved clovers in a book. Allusive, indirect, and only superficially conclusive, the story conveys an affection for and playfulness with language that reappears elsewhere. A disturbing photo of military executions seems to be the focal point of "Good Voice," where personal history elides into the world's through a book. The story dances from Fred Astaire to a child's nightmares, German exchange students, and the many words a reader underlined in a book of first world war poetry. One story segues from thoughts of D.H. Lawrence to a credit-card dispute and back to the writer. "The Ex-Wife," probably the best of the collection, has the narrator trying to cope with an ex-wife's love of books but then getting caught up in the writing of Katherine Mansfield and coming to appreciate both women more. Smith's casual, almost conversational style and structure don't produce conventional short stories, but there's an enticing intellect at work, and the accompanying threnody for lost libraries is sadly complementary. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        September 15, 2016
        While Man Booker Prize finalist Smith (How to Be Both, 2014) was working on this collection of thoughtful, sensitive, imaginative, and acidly funny short stories about characters besotted by language and books, public libraries throughout the UK were being shut down. In protest, Smith asked other writers to share their thoughts about why public libraries are essential to a life fully lived, to community and democracy, and she sets clarion testimony in support of public libraries from Kate Atkinson, Helen Oyeyemi, Miriam Toews, and others, in-between her exceptionally nimble, disarming, and affecting tales. Smith's smart, discouraged loners are beset by difficult memories and grief, and driven to quiet acts of rebellion. In one wily and crackling tale, Smith juxtaposes her narrator's fascination with D. H. Lawrence against her dismay over finding fraudulent charges on her credit card. Other arresting, emotionally incisive stories portray on-the-edge characters enthralled by Katherine Mansfield and Olive Fraser, a Scottish poet published only after her death. Smith has forged a uniquely artistic and piquant paean to the liberating and sustaining power of literature and libraries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        May 15, 2016

        Smith has been thrice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and her recent 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. Who better to write a book that offers 12 gemlike stories celebrating books--and, more significantly, that figured in a UK campaign to protest the cuts or closures threatening 500 British libraries? The stories range from a scholar chatting with her dead father about Wilfred Owen to a woman whose dreams seemingly take place in a 1960s novel; interlacing them are 12 conversations with noted authors discussing the essential role that libraries have played in their lives. The British edition has received rave reviews, and Smith is writing a special introduction for the U.S. edition.

        Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from September 1, 2016

        In one surreal if lucidly rendered story in this distinctive collection from Man Booker finalist Smith (How to be both), a woman whose body has sprouted roses says, "I had surprised myself by crying about, of all things, how beautiful a word can be." In fact, all the stories here are word-drunk; etymology is ever at stake, and one story mourns the loss of British Isles dialects since World War I even as it shows how the poetry of that era captures its "gone voices." Sharing and preserving such voices are central themes here. As Smith's introduction explains, "This happens to be a book that celebrates the communal impact on us of books and of reading," and upon its publication it became part of the campaign to defend UK public libraries from politically motivated service cuts. Included are reflections on the library's importance from ordinary readers and major authors like Kate Atkinson. VERDICT Original and always surprising. [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]

        Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 1, 2016

        In one surreal if lucidly rendered story in this distinctive collection from Man Booker finalist Smith (How to be both), a woman whose body has sprouted roses says, "I had surprised myself by crying about, of all things, how beautiful a word can be." In fact, all the stories here are word-drunk; etymology is ever at stake, and one story mourns the loss of British Isles dialects since World War I even as it shows how the poetry of that era captures its "gone voices." Sharing and preserving such voices are central themes here. As Smith's introduction explains, "This happens to be a book that celebrates the communal impact on us of books and of reading," and upon its publication it became part of the campaign to defend UK public libraries from politically motivated service cuts. Included are reflections on the library's importance from ordinary readers and major authors like Kate Atkinson. VERDICT Original and always surprising. [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]

        Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        August 1, 2016
        An engaging collection of stories that explore how people are connected by words, ideas, events, and memories and, not coincidentally, how those connections may be lost when public libraries are closed.Scottish writer Smith (How to Be Both, 2014, etc.) notes that U.K. budget cuts threaten to close as many as 1,000 public libraries. She describes her latest book as one that celebrates the communal impact on us of books and of reading. That is clearly the case in the italicized sections between the stories, in which writers and others say what public libraries have meant to them. The thematic resonance of the stories is subtler. The opener, Last, observes a handicapped woman accidentally trapped on a train through the eyes of a narrator whose mind wanders to the etymologies of buxom, stamina, clue, and other words, to thoughts of her childhood and pressing many-leaved clovers in a book. Allusive, indirect, and only superficially conclusive, the story conveys an affection for and playfulness with language that reappears elsewhere. A disturbing photo of military executions seems to be the focal point of Good Voice, where personal history elides into the worlds through a book. The story dances from Fred Astaire to a childs nightmares, German exchange students, and the many words a reader underlined in a book of first world war poetry. One story segues from thoughts of D.H. Lawrence to a credit-card dispute and back to the writer. The Ex-Wife, probably the best of the collection, has the narrator trying to cope with an ex-wifes love of books but then getting caught up in the writing of Katherine Mansfield and coming to appreciate both women more. Smiths casual, almost conversational style and structure dont produce conventional short stories, but theres an enticing intellect at work, and the accompanying threnody for lost libraries is sadly complementary.

        COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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From the acclaimed, award-winning author: Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we’ve read over our lives—our own personal libraries—make of us? What does the unraveling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us?
The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.
Woven between the stories are conversations with writers and readers reflecting on the essential role that libraries have played in their lives. At a time when public libraries around the world face threats of cuts and closures, this collection stands as a work of literary activism—and as a wonderful read from one of our finest authors.
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