Zadie Smith

AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, bestselling author of Swing Time and White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has boundless curiosity and the boundless wit to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect, set brilliantly against the context of the utterly contemporary, and considered with a deep humanity and compassion. This electrifying new collection showcases its author as a true literary powerhouse, demonstrating once again her credentials as an essential voice of her generation.

Essays

Feel Free

Helen 

 What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.

But it's my sense that no matter howy many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is the family' is always an event of some violence. It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.

Why must either life or work be perfect? Writers, like everybody else, are stumbling through this world, constantly re-examining the checks and balances of their choices, knowing they are helping here but hurting there. In my life, at least, the flesh-and- blood 'I' and the I-who-is-not-me stumble equally, neither ever coming close to perfection. But I feel extremely fortunate to be engaged in this lifelong project concerning their inter-relation, communication, mutual rejection and argument. IfI can keep saying T both ways for even half as long as Mr Roth managed it, I will count myself a very fortunate woman indeed.

Is it possible that what men consider enigmatic in women is actually agency? As in: Ifshe does not what the hell does she want? In room after room at the Louvre we will nt me, find painted women receptive to our gaze, applying for it, offering themselves up for judgement, whether it is the judgement of Paris or Cupid or Brian who just this minute got off the Eurostar. But the most famous portrait in the place, the exceptional portrait, is the one of the woman who doesn't appear to want our gaze or need it or even to know we're there. The woman who is in her own world, occupied with her own unknowable thoughts, though she is every hour surrounded by iPhone-wielding tourists. The woman who has ceased to be - or never was - concerned with whether or not you are looking at her. The woman with other things on her mind. Who has, precisely, mind! 

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happerning to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. 

Angel Martinez

Conflicted feelings yet again!! Zadie Smith is a phenomenal writer - even in what I consider to be her filler pieces, there are sentences that are so poignantly strung together that they deserve not only to be underlined but also sent to friends, shared on social media, documented in a separate journal for easy re-reading etc - but the entire thing just could have been a whole lot shorter for me. Long, meandering sentences. A surplus of examples that don't always tie back to the main thesis. Topics that I'm not necessarily knowledgeable in or interested in learning more about. Maybe at the end of the day, this was all just an unfortunate mismatch. I could see why others would like it but I can only imagine someone truly appreciating it if they've lived in Smith's exact same context.

Meniah

Inês Pinto

Winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Notable Book From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right. Arranged into five sections--In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free--this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network--and Facebook itself--really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes--and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat." Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive--and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith. Zadie Smith's new book, Grand Union, is on sale 10/8/2019.

Feel Free Essays

Reviews

Highlights