First person and other stories (Penguin Books)

The First Person and Other Stories is the fourth collection of short stories by Ali Smith. The First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones. Always intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, Smith explores the ways and whys of storytelling.

In one, a middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. In another, an innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child.

Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, a third presents its narrator, 'Ali', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and - a nymph.

Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, the stories in The First Person and Other Stories are packed full of ideas, jokes, nuance and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.

"Smith's is a profoundly optimistic vision. These stories are frightening yet funny, and the sheer exuberance and playfulness of her language endows dark matters with a lightness of touch".

(New Statesman). "She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense".(Alain de Botton). "Terrific...hurrah for Ali Smith...The best short-story writers make it look as easy as making a cup of tea.

Ali Smith is one of these...A bold and brilliant collection of stories aby a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is". (Times). "A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form".

(Independent). Ali Smith is the author of novels Girl Meets Boy, Like, The Accidental, Hotel World and There but for the. She has published the short story collections The First Person and Other Stories, Free Love and Other Stories, Other Stories and Other Stories and The Whole Story and Other Stories.

She has been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, twice nominated for the Orange Prize and won the Whitbread Novel of the Year in 2005.