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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Distinguished by Smith's trademark ability to unearth flashes of truth and depth in the everyday, The First Person and Other Stories sparkles with warmth and humanity. In one story, a middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her fourteen-year-old self. In another, an innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting, yet beautiful child. And in a third story that challenges the boundaries between fiction and reality, the narrator, 'Ali', drinks tea, phones a friend, and muses on the surprising similarities between a short story and a nymph...
Fans of Ali Smith will be delighted, amused and moved by these stories from a writer at the very top of her game.
About the Author
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental and Girl Meets Boy.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Ali Smith's newest book of short stories was a revelation to me. They unpick the nature of fiction, at the same time as being wonderfully simple, entertaining tales. The first one eavesdrops on a chat about books in a café, takes us to a cancer ward, and meditates on the saga of NICE and its approval of the drug Herceptin, at the same time as seriously considering what a short story should be, and how it works. To have covered all that in just thirteen pages seemed to me amazing.
The next, 'The Child', is completely surreal, as the narrator finds a baby in her trolley at Waitrose. Despite the weirdness, Ali Smith anchors the reader firmly in a world of Tesco Metro and British neo-nationalism, thinking about right and wrong and the phrase, 'out of the mouths of babes'.
It's hard to talk about the stories without giving away the plot, but it's a wonderful book. She has a sense of humour, her tone is just right in every story, and her intellect is ferocious and always present. I just got lost in the book on the tube this morning. I had never read anything by her before, I am ashamed to say, but will now be ordering it all. Clever, funny, utterly thought-provoking. The first book I've read for a while where I thought, I hope they are still reading this in a hundred years.
The next, 'The Child', is completely surreal, as the narrator finds a baby in her trolley at Waitrose. Despite the weirdness, Ali Smith anchors the reader firmly in a world of Tesco Metro and British neo-nationalism, thinking about right and wrong and the phrase, 'out of the mouths of babes'.
It's hard to talk about the stories without giving away the plot, but it's a wonderful book. She has a sense of humour, her tone is just right in every story, and her intellect is ferocious and always present. I just got lost in the book on the tube this morning. I had never read anything by her before, I am ashamed to say, but will now be ordering it all. Clever, funny, utterly thought-provoking. The first book I've read for a while where I thought, I hope they are still reading this in a hundred years.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's always hard to write down all your thoughts about a collection of short stories is that you want to start writing what you would for a book for each story. So I will instead try and share with you what is the essence of `The First Person and Other Stories' and also what makes them all different and interesting to read, so do bear with me as I try and accomplish this. I will start by saying that this collection of Ali Smith's has some of the most wonderful short stories in it and every single tale could actually be a set of snap shots into a selection of real people's lives, only of course we know they are fiction but sometimes its hard to differentiate.
You have many stories about love and lovers, in fact that's possibly the main running theme in this collection along with Smith's clear fascination with the English language both used to extremes in the delightful `The Third Person' which starts with the line `all short stories long' its almost too complex to explain (not helpful that) because in thirteen pages she can do so much. `No Exit' is a tale of two ex lovers who start chatting after one of them see's a woman go down a blocked exit in a cinema leading to a steamy flashback which leads to a phone call in the small hours reminiscing. `Astute Fiery Luxurious' and `The First Person' both look at the loves that have gone before the one you are with right now, the later in a most touching way that you don't expect.
My favourites of the collection however didn't really look at love, though the first you could say was the love of true friendship and of stories. The opening tale is the wonderful and touching `True Short Story' which was a tale of short stories, friendship and cancer and move. The other was a tale of a woman, who doesn't want children, finding one in her trolley whilst at the supermarket who starts to call her `Mummy' and the madness that ensues, especially when the child starts to act rather like an adult and aptly titled `The Child'.
I would have placed those first two stories at the end of the collection because they stood out so much the ones that followed until the last and aforementioned `The First Person' seemed to suffer from the first twos brilliance. A really interesting and quite compelling collection, there were the occasional loose canons here and there where I couldn't quite work out what had happened but I have to say Ali Smith is an author you can happily loose yourself in... even if you can't work out exactly what's going on for the whole time.
You have many stories about love and lovers, in fact that's possibly the main running theme in this collection along with Smith's clear fascination with the English language both used to extremes in the delightful `The Third Person' which starts with the line `all short stories long' its almost too complex to explain (not helpful that) because in thirteen pages she can do so much. `No Exit' is a tale of two ex lovers who start chatting after one of them see's a woman go down a blocked exit in a cinema leading to a steamy flashback which leads to a phone call in the small hours reminiscing. `Astute Fiery Luxurious' and `The First Person' both look at the loves that have gone before the one you are with right now, the later in a most touching way that you don't expect.
My favourites of the collection however didn't really look at love, though the first you could say was the love of true friendship and of stories. The opening tale is the wonderful and touching `True Short Story' which was a tale of short stories, friendship and cancer and move. The other was a tale of a woman, who doesn't want children, finding one in her trolley whilst at the supermarket who starts to call her `Mummy' and the madness that ensues, especially when the child starts to act rather like an adult and aptly titled `The Child'.
I would have placed those first two stories at the end of the collection because they stood out so much the ones that followed until the last and aforementioned `The First Person' seemed to suffer from the first twos brilliance. A really interesting and quite compelling collection, there were the occasional loose canons here and there where I couldn't quite work out what had happened but I have to say Ali Smith is an author you can happily loose yourself in... even if you can't work out exactly what's going on for the whole time.
Format:Paperback
Having really enjoyed some of Ali Smith's previous works, especially The Accidental, I was really looking forward to her latest work. Unfortunately, I just didn't enjoy it, although I persevered to the end. A series of short stories, none of them seemed to flow properly, they seemed too 'cold' and left the reader uninterested in the plotline. Overall, disappointing.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would
Read this as part of a book club. It did get quite mixed reviews from different readers. There were parts of each story that interested me and were indeed thought provoking. Read more
Published on 4 Nov 2009 by Saied
"So many pieces of me! I must hold tight," Edwin Morgan
''True to oneself! Which self?'' Katherine Mansfield
Two of the epigraphs for Ali Smith's new collection of short stories underline her theme of the multiplicities of... Read more
Two of the epigraphs for Ali Smith's new collection of short stories underline her theme of the multiplicities of... Read more
Published on 8 July 2009 by purpleheart
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