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How to Be Both
Ali Smith, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375424106
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)