Anne’s College, Oxford, in which she meditates on grief and form and liminal space, on seeing and being seen, on the nature and meaning of time and art. A glorious hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, Artful intersperses the story of an unnamed narrator mourning the death of a lover with the texts of four lectures on craft delivered by Smith in early 2012 at St. Artful can be read as a prequel to How to Be Both, a primer, if you will, on Smith’s creative and metaphysical concerns. All great books are in correspondence with one another, as she notes, and none more so than her own Artful with How to Be Both, her sixth and most recent novel. I know it’s bad form to start a review with such a hefty quote but - at the risk of making myself superfluous - the best person to illuminate the work of Ali Smith is Ali Smith. Because come then go we will, and in that order. You can’t step into the same story twice - or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings.

always in correspondence with the books which came before them. “We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.” But “books need time to dawn on us” and are: “WE DO TREAT books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture,” writes Ali Smith, in Artful, her genre-bending release from 2012.

The accidental by ali smith