BOOK DISCUSSION: How to be both.
Wed, May 10, 6:30pm
EPL&M welcomes back Art Professor Camille Serchuk from Southern Connecticut State University to lead our discussion of Ali Smith’s award winning novel, How to be Both. Copies available for checkout at EPL&M one month in advance.
Short-Listed For the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the 2014 Costa Novel Award
Winner of the Saltire Literary Book of the Year Award
A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times
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.
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