Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

Ha ha!

I wish I could tell my friend who died that story. But then, if she were still alive, I probably wouldn’t think to, wouldn’t want to in the same way. And in some ways here I am doing exactly that, telling all this in the direction of my friend who died young and was a work of art, no: a work of life, though she died so roughly, and wherever those thieves are hiding her till they can sell her, they have to tape blankets over the windows because the light coming off her mind, even though she’s dead, gives away her whereabouts, and they have to keep pulling up and cutting back the flowers and tendrils and green stuff that persistently crack the stone of the floors of wherever they’ve got her. That’s the art of dying all right.

Pretty soon that whole place will resemble I don’t know what, probably a library, one with trees growing right through its floors up past its shelves and piercing its roof. They’ll try and stop it happening; they’ll move her to the next empty cave or mansion or cellar or wherever, but it doesn’t matter where she is. She’ll do the same to it and to the one after it and to the one after that, and so on.

Acknowledgements and grateful thanks to the following publications, where stories from this collection first appeared:

Ox-Tales Fire; New Statesman; Goodbye to All That; Elsewhere; The Times; Harper’s Bazaar . ‘The beholder’ was originally commissioned by Durham Literature Festival and published, along with ‘The poet’, in Shire (2012). ‘The definite article’ was first published in the Park Stories series and is dedicated to Mary Chadwick.

Thank you to everyone

who helped in some way with this book, by telling me or sending me their library stories.

Special thanks to Kate Atkinson, Lori Beck, Xandra Bingley, Tracy Bohan, Lesley Bryce, Mary Chadwick, Helen Clyne, Lucy Gulland, Alexandra Harris, Debbie Hodder, Pat Hunter, Anna James, Clare Jennings, Jackie Kay, Eve Lacey, Olivia Laing, Sophie Mayer, Cathy Moore, Helen Oyeyemi, Richard Popple, Simon Prosser, Anna Ridley, Kamila Shamsie, Miriam Toews, Miriam Toews’s mother, Emily Wainwright, Natalie Williams, Emma Wilson, Sarah Wood.