{"id":44,"date":"2006-03-27T03:51:06","date_gmt":"2006-03-27T03:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/knownforms.com\/wordpress\/?p=44"},"modified":"2006-03-27T03:51:06","modified_gmt":"2006-03-27T03:51:06","slug":"ali-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/?p=44","title":{"rendered":"Ali Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a new hero: Ali Smith. I read a short story of hers in The Whole Story and Other Stories<\/em> and was completely hooked. I spent the last few months hunting down everything she’s written and devouring it all.<\/p>\n

My absolute favorite of hers is Hotel World<\/a>\"\". Why, you ask. Because the woman is quite simply a genius with language. Hotel World<\/em> is sort of a novel, sort of a collection of interconnected short stories that center around a hotel and the tragic events that took place there. It starts with a story told from the point of a view of the girl who died in that hotel and good ghod can Ali Smith write! It’s disjointed and haunting and absolutely right for a girl who’s confused and hasn’t quite gotten the hang of being dead yet. It then takes up the POV of completely different women who are affected directly and indirectly by this girl’s death.<\/p>\n

All of Ali Smith’s work is absolutely breathtaking and it’s full of the fantastical everyday I absolutely love (see Kelly Link, Jeanette Winterson, etc.) (an old woman in one story is haunted by a bagpipe band), but Hotel World stands out for me because it does something completely unexpected. Ali Smith’s writing is ‘experimental’ in the best sense of the word. It’s still accessible despite the way she twists and folds language because it feels like the true voice of the characters. It feels like transcribed thought and that’s a hell of a trick to master. It’s murder on the language. As an experimental ‘lit fic’ writer, I was expecting a certain type of ending from Ms. Smith. Something detached. There’s a definite trend to the cool (I’m talking temperature here) and unemotional in literary fiction. As if emotion and passion and longing are relegated to ‘genre’ fiction. As the pages dwindled in Hotel World<\/em> I was gripped with terror at the thought that it would end with a detached shrug like so many ‘literary’ novels, but Ms. Smith went there<\/em>. I won’t give away the details, but it was absolutely, completely, and utterly right<\/em>. I cried my eyes out and I mean that in the best way possible. Not just because of the story, but the language that made the story. Everything comes together (language, characterization, story, etc.) and just resonates<\/em>. Thank you Ali Smith.<\/p>\n

Also, here’s a funny and insightful interview with Ms. Smith in The Times <\/em>(London), conducted by one of my other heroes, Jeanette Winterson.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a new hero: Ali Smith. I read a short story of hers in The Whole Story and Other Stories and was completely hooked. I spent the last few months hunting down everything she’s written and devouring it all. My absolute favorite of hers is Hotel World. Why, you ask. Because the woman is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moorer.lipkandy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}