In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted-literally-by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that art and life are never separate. Artful is a celebration of and meaningful contribution to literature’s enduring worth in the world. There has never been a book quite like it.

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That’s what it felt like for Keats in 1819. How about Autumn 2016? Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever. Ali Smith’s new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. It is the first installment of her Seasonal quartet-four stand-alone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are)-and it casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history making. Here’s where we’re living. Here’s time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, a story about aging and time and love and stories themselves.

La historia universal reune doce historias que recorren un ano completo. Ali Smith es una de las mejores escritoras del Reino Unido. Este libro, en el que nos encontramos con algunos de sus mejores textos, contiene doce cuentos en los que el amor, la tristeza y, muy especialmente, los libros y los libreros son los protagonistas.

Doce cuentos que recorren un ano completo, comenzando en febrero, el mes en que transcurre el primero, <>, y terminando en enero, con el relato <>. En algunos cuentos se menciona el mes especificamente, en otros solo se hace una referencia a la estacion. Las estaciones son una imagen recurrente en los cuentos, como tambien lo son los libros y las plantas, sobre todo, los arboles. Historias unicas que se entrelazan en un laberinto de coincidencias, oportunidades, conexiones perdidas y reencontradas.

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?
Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.
‘Every hello, like every voice,
holds its story ready, waiting.’

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

This story of three men’s work helping traumatized kids in one of America’s most underserved cities reveals how mindfulness tools can help children and communities not only survive but thrive

 In this inspiring book, founders of The Holistic Life Foundation Ali Smith, Atman Smith, and Andres Gonzalez describe how they have spent the past twenty years teaching yoga, meditation, and breathwork to thousands of at-risk kids in Baltimore schools helping them to develop deep reserves of patience, empathy, resolve, and—when needed—the righteous anger that fuels deep structural change. Their work has received wide national attention due to their remarkable results: The schools that have participated in their programs have seen suspension rates plummet and graduation rates go through the roof.
 
Ali and Atman discovered as young children the power of mindfulness practices to sustain them through the challenges of growing up in a neighborhood in Baltimore that was struggling with poverty and violence—a community they now serve. The Holistic Life Foundation’s mission is to empower kids to find this same stillness and light within themselves and to let it shine out to help change the world. In this book, Ali, Atman and Andres share hands-on mindfulness and meditation tools readers can teach kids that will empower them to do this same work in their own communities. Let Your Light Shine is essential reading for parents, educators, activists, and anyone looking to make a difference in the lives of young people.
 

La escritora escocesa Ali Smith es una de las autoras mas destacadas de los ultimos anos en el Reino Unido y su Cuarteto estacional, uno de los proyectos mas ambiciosos e inspiradores de la literatura europea actual.
Otono es el primer titulo de esta tetralogia. El Reino Unido esta hecho pedazos, dividido tras un verano historico. Ambientada justo despues del referendum del brexit, la novela nos da a entender que la sociedad que describia Dickens no ha desaparecido del todo, sino que se ha transformado en algo peor, victima de la decadencia moral y politica. Ali Smith escribe con humor y delicadeza, muy cerca de sus personajes. El elogio de la amistad continuada y las relaciones de afecto son mas relevantes con el trasfondo de este declive ideologico actual.
Como siempre en los libros de esta escritora, la lectura y las referencias literarias estan muy presentes: Shakespeare, Dickens, Huxley, Keats… aparecen en estas inolvidables paginas.

“Ahora no queremos Informacion. Lo que queremos es desconcierto. Lo que queremos es repeticion. Lo que queremos es repeticion. […] Queremos que aquellos a quienes llamamos extranjeros se sientan extranjeros necesitamos que les quede claro que no pueden tener derechos a menos que nosotros lo digamos”.

?Que une a Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, el Brexit, el presente, el pasado, un hombre de luto por los tiempos perdidos, una mujer atrapada en los tiempos modernos?

La respuesta esta en Primavera, una novela luminosa, generosa y llena de esperanza, en la que, al igual que en Otono e Invierno, la autora escocesa esta haciendo algo mas que analizar las injusticias de nuestra epoca: nos ilumina el camino para salir de la pesadilla.

En esta tercera entrega de su Cuarteto estacional, Ali Smith nos muestra de nuevo por que es una de las mejores escritoras del momento.

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.

On the heels of Autumn and Winter comes Spring, the continuation 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.

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.

Barefoot, thirty-something Amber shows up at the door of a Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer, insinuating herself into their family. Dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives under the searing lens of Amber’s perceptions. When the mother Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not-as they find when they return home to London-from their profoundly altered lives.
Fearlessly intelligent, disarmingly playful, The Accidental is a Joycean tour-de-force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling.

At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and the story of Miles is one told from the points of view of four of them: a woman in her forties called Anna, a man in his sixties called Mark, a woman in her eighties called May, and a ten-year-old child called Brooke. The thing is . . . none of these people knows Miles anything more than glancingly. So how much is it possible to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, most fleeting meetings we have every day with other human beings?Brilliantly audacious, disarmingly playful, full of Smith#8217;s trademark wit and puns, There But For The is a deft exploration of the human need for separation-from our pasts and from one another-and the redemptive possibilities for connections.

La cuarta novela del Cuarteto estacional del finalista del Premio Man Booker, Ali Smith, es “un poema en prosa en alabanza de la memoria, el perdon, la broma y aprovechar el momento” (The New York Times)

En el presente, Sacha sabe que el mundo esta en problemas. Su hermano Robert solo es un problema. Su madre y su padre estan teniendo problemas. Mientras tanto, el mundo esta en crisis, y la verdadera debacle ni siquiera ha comenzado todavia. En el pasado, un verano encantador. Un hermano y una hermana diferentes saben que estan viviendo en el tiempo prestado.

Esta es una historia sobre personas al borde del cambio. Son familia, pero piensan que son extranos. Entonces: ?Donde comienza la familia? ?Y que tienen en comun las personas

From the Man Booker-short-listed and Baileys Women’s Prize-winning author of How to be both, the highly anticipated second novel in the acclaimed Seasonal series, which both continues the arc of the series and is also an extraordinary stand-alone read. In Winter, life force matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to Ali Smith’s sensational Autumn, Smith’s shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory, and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It’s the season that teaches us survival.