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“Which game would you rather play? I’ll give you a choice of two. One. Every picture tells a story. Two. Every story tells a picture.”1 So proposes Daniel Gluck to…

I first read Ali Smith’s Autumn in book club. Serendipity dropped me onto an Upper East Side studio couch, and for many months after, I found myself crowded in amongst a cohort…

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life.” — Woolf, The Waves I was reading, desultorily, the stories of Muriel Spark during a…

We call a poet a “poet’s poet” when they’re read mostly by other poets. By implication, a poet’s poet is difficult or obscure or both. When I call certain novelists…

It is an incontrovertible fact that works of art age. The distance between the time when a novel is written and the time when it is read only grows wider….

Hi, the visitor called Charlotte says. Hi, he says. Visitor. Visitation. There seems to be a force which bodies, by their very presence, exert on each other                                                                                                 — Ali Smith, Summer (76)…

In How to be Both, one of Ali Smith’s signature smart and snarky teenage girls, George, and her mother, an online activist-artist, have an argument about the lyrics to the Pet…