The best short story collections — from childish gabbling to jaded nihilism

Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter prattling away to us through one of the book’s famously interchangeable halves, will be glad to see her new book of short stories, Public Library and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99). It looks reassuringly similar: white hardback;

photograph of two contemporary studenty people on the jacket; large font-size; non-justified lines; no quotation marks for dialogue.

Here we are again reading Smith’s deliberately childlike prose. It’s not just the lack of quotation marks that makes it seem so — although this does have that same endearing Young Visiters effect — but also her use of extra-long and extra-short sentences, and her guileless barging into domestic situations. It’s a pleasure to read, because she writes gabbling sentences others wouldn’t allow themselves to write, such as, ‘It all really makes me think of the thing she says where she says…’

But these stories are a notch higher on the loopiness scale than How to be Both.