Login
Register
Home || Search || About us || Blog || Contact us || Other book sites

Name: How To Be Both

Full title: How To Be Both: A Novel
Author: Ali Smith
Year: 2014
Rank:

Rating:

Original Rating:

Popularity: 2.2
Genres/categories: Historical fiction, Award winners, Art
Culture: Italy

Purchase/research links:

ISBN:
9780307275257
0307275256
Winner of the Costa Book Award for Novel in 2014.
Winner of the Saltire Society Literary Award for Literary Book in 2014.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion-and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humor of her voice.

How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real-and all life's givens get given a second chance.

A NOTE TO THE READER:
Who says stories reach everybody in the same order?
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA.
In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES.
The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.

The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which edition you happen to receive, the book will be: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. Enjoy the adventure.
Similar books:

The House of Sleep
by Jonathan Coe

Wish You Were Here
by Graham Swift

Rule Britannia
by Daphne Du Maurier

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
by Jon McGregor

Metroland
by Julian Barnes

The Closed Circle
by Jonathan Coe

Picture This
by Joseph Heller

The Children's Hour
by Marcia Willett

Seek My Face
by John Updike

Stay with Me Till Morning
by John Braine

Headlong
by Michael Frayn

Hotel World
by Ali Smith

The Flamethrowers
by Rachel Kushner

An Unsuitable Attachment
by Barbara Pym

The Effects of Light
by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Burning Bright
by Tracy Chevalier

The Way to Paradise
by Mario Vargas Llosa

I Am Madame X
by Gioia Diliberto

As Above, So Below
by Rudy Rucker

The Agony and the Ecstasy
by Irving Stone