How to be Both - Softcover

Smith, Ali

3.66

23,879 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241146828 ISBN 13: 9780241146828

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2014

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How to be both is the dazzling new novel by Ali Smith.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.

How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph

'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton

'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Artful, There but for the, Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.

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Review:

Magical (Sunday Times)

Radical, dazzling . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith's re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains (Independent)

How to be both is a demanding, restless, brain-ache of a book that is simultaneously a delight and a challenge...What happens here is that you have to let go and revel in life's poetry. The effect is magical (Sunday Times)

Ali Smith is an unrepentant stylist...How to be both reads as if she has summoned words from some region of the unconscious and released them in a trance...Smith's fervent, vital, incantatory prose is entirely her own (Joanna Kavenna Prospect)

Dealing with grief, obsession, sexuality and the versatility of art itself, Smith has created a stunning work that is as rewarding as it is challenging (The List)

Dazzling (Independent)

Stunning (The List)

This warm, funny, subtle, layered, intelligent book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times (Honor Clerk Spectator)

Utterly contemporary and vividly historical (Holly Williams The Independent)

Vital (Prospect)

From the Back Cover:

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Bothis a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.Please Note: This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.

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