Public library and other stories / Ali Smith.

Library -- Last -- That beautiful new build -- Good voice -- Opened by Mark Twain -- The beholder -- A clean, well-lighted place -- The poet -- The ideal model of society -- The human claim -- Soon to be sold -- The ex-wife -- Put a price on that -- The art of elsewhere -- On Bleak House Road -- After life -- Curve tracing -- The definite article -- The library sunlight -- Grass -- The making of me -- Say I won't be there -- The infinite possibilities -- And so on.

"Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we've read over our lives - our own personal libraries - make of us? What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith's new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they coax us endlessly to unexpected blossom; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make." -- Book jacket.