Ali Smith

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

The dazzling new novel about art by the Man Booker- and Orange Prize-shortlisted author of The Accidental
     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.

How to Be Both

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Had about 8 dog eared pages, straightened back out as much as possible 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Novel

The fourth novel in the Seasonal Quartet by Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith is "a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke, and seizing the moment" (The New York Times) In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world's in meltdown--and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer.

Summer

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Louisiana

New York

From the astonishingly talented writer of The Accidental and Hotel World comes Ali Smith's brilliant retelling of Ovid's gender-bending myth of Iphis and Ianthe, as seen through the eyes of two Scottish sisters. Girl Meets Boy is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, and the absurdity of consumerism, as well as a story of reversals and revelations that is as sharply witty as it is lyrical. Funny, fresh, poetic, and political, Girl Meets Boy is a myth of metamorphosis for a world made in Madison Avenue's image, and the funniest addition to the Myths series from Canongate since Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad.

Girl Meets Boy

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The pages have some yellowing. And a few are dog eared. ￼

The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. The Accidental is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time.

Accidental

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Please review photos. There is some underlining in this copy. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

South Carolina

From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet--a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit,  the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?

Spring. The great connective.

With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door.

The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?

Hope springs eternal.

Spring

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Massachusetts

From the Man Booker short-listed author of Autumn, Winter, and Spring comes Summer, the highly anticipated fourth novel in her acclaimed Seasonal Quartet. Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.

Washington

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.

Public Library and Other Stories

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California

Award-winning author Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel grounded both in the contemporary era and in the uncannily familiar era of the Black Plague. Companion Piece stands apart from her astonishing Seasonal Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith's groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times.

"A woman receives an unexpected call from a former classmate asking for help deciphering a puzzling interaction, and from there, Smith spins out a broader story about loneliness, refuge and freedom." --The New York Times Book Review

"Lyrical and timely . . . Smith's novel will push readers to consider what it means to let people into your life, even when you don't want to."
--TIME

"A story is never an answer. A story is always a question."

Here we are in extraordinary times.
Is this history?
 
What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other?
What have we lost?
What stays with us?
What does it take to unlock our future?
 
"Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting."

Companion Piece

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Award-winning author Ali Smith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague. In the hope that our medieval past may unlock the answers we seek to understand our hazy future, Companion Piece is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to Smith's gorgeous canon.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

"Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2017"--Copyright page.

Winter

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Tommy Orange

Naomi Alderman

Elif Batuman

Helen Oyeyemi

Ten Kafkaesque Stories

What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers. Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a profit and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment. From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

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Michigan

The ghost of Sara Wilby, a chambermaid who falls to her death in the hotel dumbwaiter, brings together four other women--Lise, a disgruntled receptionist; Else, a homeless woman; Penny, a journalist; and Clare, Sara's distraught sister. Original. 30,000 first printing.

Hotel World

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Delaware

Exene Cervenka

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Arizona

A Memoir

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, extremely funny, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith--coming of age in '90s New York--who commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply. As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents' toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to. She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world--from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She's often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny--all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact. Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the '90s music scene--alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative--as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarity.

The Ballad of Speedball Baby

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New Jersey

"Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of pop art, Autumn is [an] ... excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation--in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive--on what richness and worth are, what harvest means"--

Autumn

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Oregon

From Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith, Winter is the second novel in her Seasonal Quartet. This much-anticipated follow-up to Autumn is one of the Best Books of the Year from the New York Public Library.
 
"A stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history." --Time
 
Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art's mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art's seeing things himself.
 
When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone?
 
Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith's shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.

Arkansas

North Carolina

This is a library discard version. The spine is a little skewed as photographed but the book itself is readable with no markings on the pages. 

Virginia

A finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing "thrilling." Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her "style, ideas, and punch." Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor. Amber - thirtysomething and barefoot - shows up at the door of the Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. She talks her way in. She tells nothing but lies. She stays for dinner. Eve Smart, the author of a best-selling series of biographical reconstructions, thinks Amber is a student with whom her husband, Michael, is sleeping. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age twelve, thinks she's her mother's friend. Son Magnus, age seventeen, thinks she's an angel. As Amber insinuates herself into the family, the questions of who she is and how she's come to be there drop away. Instead, dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives through the searing lens of Amber's perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not - they discover when they return home to London - from their profoundly altered lives. Fearlessly intelligent and written with an irresistible blend of lyricism and whimsy, The Accidental is a tour de force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling.

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Tommy Orange; Ali Smith; Naomi Alderman; Elif Batuman; Helen Oyeyemi

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