Page 49 - Ali Smith News Today

Spring by Ali Smith Suddenly I realized I had not read Spring, which has been sitting on a shelf for two years. How could this happen? My excuse is that I do not regard Ali Smith’s book as narratives but as adventures, so I save them for when I really need them (like now). When I read her books I have no idea what I’m getting into. The author trusts that I don’t need a road map—I jump in, and as I hurtle down (or up, I can’t tell) I am assailed by sights, sounds, wordplay, puns, feeli...

Want to read more? At the start of the pandemic in March we took the decision to make online access to our news free of charge by taking down our paywall. At a time where accurate information about Covid-19 was vital to our community, this was the right decision – even though it meant a drop in our income. In order to help safeguard the future of our journalism, the time has now come to reinstate our paywall, However,  rest assured that access to all Covid related news will still remain free...

LAST FERRY TO ORCADIA: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn. On the Wednesday night before the election a violent storm hit Caithness. Around eight o clock the sky turned black and great sheets of snow, sleet and hail lashed in from the Atlantic on a cruel North West wind. Ghostly, almost thunderless, white lightening flashed like a signal out of the firmament. Surely, I thought, this is a portent, like the Valkyrie seen over Murkle before the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, for one of the m...

Whats On Scotland 7-21 May: Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival & more This week sees the return of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, offering screenings, workshops, and talks processing and healing from the last year. Elsewhere, in-person art returns to Jupiter Artland and Stills, and music fills Leith Theatre. Feature by Anahit Behrooz | 07 May 2021 Following one of the hardest years many of us have ever known, this years Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival is a moment o...

Crowdfunding campaign for oxygen concentrators catches new tailwinds; artists to send signed works to donors © Mohammed Shaikh Crowdfunding campaign for oxygen concentrators catches new tailwinds; artists to send signed works to donors As India struggles to provide oxygen for Covid patients needing urgent care, over 50 writers and artists from South Asia and abroad have banded together under the Artists for India initiative to raise funds for oxygen concentrators. Led by Goa-born, London-ba...

The celebrated author talks about writing to the calendar, our new Dickensian age, and how she once imagined she’d become a refuse collector

Olivia Laing’s Reading Piles Are Far From Organized Credit...Jillian Tamaki April 29, 2021 “There are something like 15,000 books in our house,” says the author of “Everybody” and other books, “including pretty much every poetry pamphlet published in the 20th century. It’s a problem.” What books are on your night stand? Seed catalogs, and a book that says on the cover “Bear I love you, bite my head off” (on closer inspection it’s called â�...

Frederik Wissink I write this on the day we come out of lockdown. Shops and pubs and restaurants are opening, there was both snow yesterday and tropical sunshine. The weather is confused, I am confused; both of us caught up in some kind of cosmic bi-polarity. And yet this is what I know. A year after the going in and now a year later the coming out, a little list of what has given me pleasure over the past 12 months. Advertisement Propagating plants. Chinese money plants make this very easy. Th...

Last modified on Wed 28 Apr 2021 13.31 EDT This year’s shortlist for the Women’s prize for fiction is made up of authors who have never been nominated for the award before, with Yaa Gyasi, Susanna Clarke and Patricia Lockwood among those competing for £30,000. The annual award for an “outstanding, ambitious, original” novel by a woman features several stories about “lives you haven’t read about before”, said chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker p...

This year’s Lesbian Visibility Week takes place between 26 April and 2 May. To celebrate the week-long event we’ve compiled a list of some essential books written by and about lesbians that you need to add to your bookshelf. From inspirational memoirs to personal essays and feel-good stories to important historical texts, there’s plenty to get started with. Lesbian Visibility Week was created by DIVA publisher Linda Riley “both to celebrate lesbians and show solidarity with all LGBT+ w...