Books by Ali Smith
“This is my favourite of the five books I’ve recommended. To be honest, I prefer Ali Smith’s version to Sophocles’s. It’s a lot funnier, for a start…The crow narrator is a stroke of genius. He reminds me a little of Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets.” Read more...
The Best Classics Books for Children
Annelise Gray, Children's Author
“The whole idea of writing something and bringing it straight out… the balls of that. She just did it: committed to it, got everyone around her to commit to it—publishers, everyone in the industry. That’s just extraordinary. She has done something which no one else has done, which is catalogue a year.” Read more...
Melissa Harrison, Environmentalist
Refugee Tales
as told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah and many others
“Refugee Tales is particularly interesting because it combines literature and activism. It shows a really idiosyncratic take on the Canterbury Tales. This group of people have recreated the Canterbury pilgrimage, and walked through the land as a group of refugees and writers. Recent refugees told their stories, and for each refugee, a writer then wrote up a version of that story.” Read more...
The Canterbury Tales: A Reading List
Marion Turner, Biographer
“It’s wonderfully written and it does capture this atmosphere of a society not in chaos but unsure of itself, not clear where it’s going…It’s not set in somewhere that’s particularly left behind. It’s not set in a decaying, northern ex-mill town or somewhere like that. It’s set in a moderately prosperous part of the country. Statistically (going back to the previous book) you could probably guess that the place that it’s set probably voted to leave by not much—maybe 55-45—so is reasonably reflective of the country as a whole.” Read more...
The Best Things to Read on Brexit
Jonathan Portes, Economist
“Smith’s most celebrated novel so far. It is the story of a family that goes on holiday, implodes and then comes back together again.” Read more...
Robert Eaglestone, Literary Scholar
“In Smith’s work in general, she’s very much critiquing a lot of the intellectual or cognitive impulses that underlie the desire and demand for self-help. The idea of ‘how to be both’, the critique of dualistic thinking, polarizing thought and reductive solutions and facile answers—all of that is something that’s being challenged by the experience of reading her narrative, in interesting ways.” Read more...
Beth Blum, Literary Scholar
Interviews where books by Ali Smith were recommended
The Best Self-Help Novels, recommended by Beth Blum
Since the publication of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859) in Victorian Britain, self-help has become a billion dollar industry—and its influence is even felt in the contemporary novel, says Harvard literary scholar Beth Blum, author of The Self-Help Compulsion, a new history of the rise of self-help narratives in modern literature.
The Best Contemporary Fiction, recommended by Robert Eaglestone
The novel is no longer the king of the narrative arts, says the writer and academic Robert Eaglestone. Yet literature has never been more interesting. Here he discusses five excellent novels that exemplify current trends in contemporary fiction.
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1
What Next: How to get the best from Brexit
by Daniel Hannan -
2
Brexit Beckons: Thinking ahead by leading economists
by Richard Baldwin (ed) -
3
Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’
by Dominic Cummings -
4
Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union
by Harold Clarke, Matthew Goodwin & Paul Whiteley -
5
Autumn
by Ali Smith
The Best Things to Read on Brexit, recommended by Jonathan Portes
The Best Things to Read on Brexit, recommended by Jonathan Portes
Why did Brexit happen? What does the future hold for Britain outside the European Union? Can trade economists help? The economist and former head of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a non-partisan think tank, recommends the best books (and one blogpost) on Brexit.
The Canterbury Tales: A Reading List, recommended by Marion Turner
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales not only revolutionized English poetry—they’re also extremely funny and moving. Oxford Professor Marion Turner, who has written the first full-length biography of Chaucer in a generation, tells us about the extraordinary man who wrote them and why we should all read the Canterbury Tales.
The best books on Summer, recommended by Melissa Harrison
Temperatures ratcheting, tinderbox conditions, a pressure cooker atmosphere… summer is a handy literary shorthand for rising tensions. But in the natural world, summer is a quiet time when the flowers die back and the fruits and seeds are ripening. Here, Melissa Harrison—the novelist, nature writer and podcaster—recommends five of the best summer books, for those who like to read in step with the seasons.
The Best Classics Books for Children, recommended by Annelise Gray
Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire continue to fascinate children and provide fertile ground for historical novels that resonate with today’s readers. Author and classicist Annelise Gray talks us through some of her favourite books for children set in the ancient Mediterranean world and Roman Britain.
