And so once again, we return to one of my preferred subjects for fiction: the making of art. Three of the four central characters in Sarah Hall’s How to Paint a Dead Man are artists; the two focal characters of A.G. Porta’s The No World Concerto are writers; and Ali Smith’s Artful is constructed around a series of lectures given on the subjects of art and aesthetics. None of these are traditionally structured, and that’s one of the pleasures of reading them: how […]