Re-imagining the Common in Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories

Before turning to the novel, Ali Smith produced several short story collections in which she laid the foundations of her poetics of fiction. Constantly playing with the limits of reality and fiction, and fashioning a metamorphic imaginary, Smith’s short stories are also the site of a reflexion on the experience of reading and of its inherent relationality. Public Library, published in 2015, opens an experimental space, in which Smith reworks many of the motifs and themes that have become central to her work: transgression, loss and its overcoming, the links between private and collective memory. The collection is also the site of a political reflexion on the making of the common. Against the neo-liberal turn of the knowledge economy, the collection defends a politics of shared knowledge, as instanciated by public libraries. As often in Smith’s work, her reflexion on form, here the short story, becomes the matter for an embodied analysis of our collective identity and shared becoming. Weaving a tight intertextual “multilogue” between past and present, between the intimate and the collective, Public Library unfolds a poetics of common reading as experiential becoming.