The Whole Story and Other Stories

By Ali Smith

Book Overview

From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author comes a collection of uniquely inventive stories that thread the labyrinth of coincidence, chance, and connections missed and made.

What happens when you run into Death in a busy train station? (You know he's Death because when he smiles, your cell phone goes dead.) What if your lover falls in love with a tree? Should you be jealous? From the woman pursued by a band of bagpipers in full regalia to the artist who's built a seven-foot boat out of secondhand copies of The Great Gatsby, Smith's characters are offbeat, charming, sexy, and as wonderfully complex as life itself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 140007567X
• ISBN13: 9781400075676
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

what we really are

This is a writer who innovates, with spare, accurate, fresh prose. Modern characters are alive, complex,with fantastic ability to love and defy expectations. The after-taste is deeply comforting stories, though these stories can also be unsettling and provocative. Funny too. Funny is really the thing. These stories prod the funny bone of our tender human worries, wants and heartbreaks. Truly beautiful writing, I'm collecting every one of her books. Thank you Ali Smith, for writing! Very beautiful stories here!

A brilliant and natural writer

I have the highest praise for Ali Smith's formidable talents as a writer. These are some of the best short stories written in a very long time. Her use of language and her sophisticated but enormously successful technique is a rare find. I recommend this collection and all of Ali Smith's work highly.

Like a nesting doll

Everything Ali Smith writes burrows deep inside itself, making the mundane of everyday life magical; lovely; beautiful. We need authors like her to remind us that love lays in the heart of everything, and it isn't always pretty. Of all her work this collection of "love" stories is a particular favorite of mine. It's simple in such a twisted way it becomes complex. Lovers forced to reflect on life's complex series of compromises, disappointments and find beauty in the smallness of the world around them. Obsessions rise to the surface and bury sanity. As the reader we are given a series of views that pull us deeper and deeper into the story, sometimes including us as part. The final story wrapping up the whole theory; no matter how horrible it all is, no matter how wonderful it all is, the WHOLE story is so much more.

Thoroughly enchanting

I'm a big fan of Jeanette Winterson, and I'll confess that her endorsement on the cover of the book sold me. But after reading this delightful collection cover to cover in a couple of days, I'll say Smith's work is its own endorsement. Like Winterson, Smith has a magical quality to her storytelling and her I/you gender play (I'm surprised the official book review above claims so smugly that the person who fell in love with a tree had a husband!) I was hooked from the first tale, "The Universal Story" (which reminded me of Woolf's splendid "Kew Gardens") and kept finding gem after gem. Even the longest stories seemed to fly by. Ali Smith is a really rewarding read. She's invigorated my summer reading.