Showing results by author "Zadie Smith" in All Categories

Split into five sections - Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering - Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians, and Italian divas. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny - a gift to readers and writers both.

Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving 11 completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction.

It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper - and cousin by marriage - of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.

Zadie Smith's White Teeth is a classic international best seller and an unforgettable portrait of London. One of the most talked about fictional debuts ever, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-listen.

In the past two decades, few writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion. This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.

This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

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.

Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: About rhythm and time, about Black bodies and Black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.

Somewhere in Northwest London stands Caldwell housing estate, relic of 70s urban planning. Five identical blocks, deliberately named: Hobbes, Smith, Bentham, Locke, and Russell. If you grew up there, the plan was to get out and get on, to something bigger, better. Thirty years later ex-Caldwell kids Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan have all made it out, with varying degrees of succes - whatever that means....

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality - or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

In this 1983 short story - the only short story Morrison ever wrote - we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.

Dos niñas son obligadas a compartir habitación en un centro de acogida. Una blanca y otra negra. Ambas se rechazan de inmediato, pero poco a poco se dan cuenta de que tienen en común más de lo que esperaban. «La sal y la pimienta», como las empiezan a llamar los demás, se vuelven inseparables, y con el paso del tiempo se van encontrando en distintos lugares: un restaurante, un supermercado, una manifestación, siempre en lados opuestos de los conflictos sociales.

Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, his business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them - all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the reinstatement of some kind of all-powerful, benevolent God-type figure, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of '40s movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.

Maud—the judo-suit-wearing guinea pig and proud oddball—is off into the wild, as is Kit, her owner. Both are slightly nervous about what they’ll find in the great outdoors, but with a pinch of bravery—and a few Signature Moves—they’ll make new friends and explore new worlds . . .A warm and endearing story celebrating the quiet power of being yourself.

Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and true identity, how they shape us and how we can survive them. Moving from Northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time. Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe or makes a person truly free.

Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful? Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families—the Belseys and the Kipps—and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions—both personal and political—of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.

Situado en un barrio londinense de inmigrantes, el inmenso fresco humano que dibuja la autora tiene como epicentro las familias de Archie Jones y Samad Iqbal, dos ex combatientes de la Segunda Guerra Mundial que vuelven a encontrarse después de treinta años sin verse. Archie está casado con una jamaicana exuberante y Samad con Alsana, bengalí como él, y con las ideas muy claras.

Corre el año 1873. La escocesa Eliza Touchet es la prima y ama de llaves de William Ainsworth, un novelista antaño famoso pero ahora en decadencia, con quien vive desde hace treinta años. Mujer de múltiples intereses —la literatura, la justicia, el abolicionismo, las clases sociales y las esposas de su primo—, Eliza se entusiasma con un intrigante juicio que está levantando encendidas pasiones en Londres: sir Roger Tichborne, heredero de un enorme imperio y desaparecido en el mar años antes, ha reaparecido de repente y reclama lo que le corresponde.