Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays - Couverture rigide

A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith?s nonfiction over the past decade.

Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.

Split into four sections??Reading,? ?Being,? ?Seeing,? and ?Feeling?? Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith?s unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays?some published here for the first time?on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.

In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers?E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others?have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences?in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond?that have nourished Smith?s rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.

Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.

“Smith writes with a beguiling mix of assurance and solemnity, borrowing her vocabulary from many intellectual and cultural sources... Smith’s native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can’t help hoping she’ll change her mind yet again.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Smith brings her novelist’s gifts— an eye for detail, a languid turn of phrase— to the essay form.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Taken together, [these essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite and earnestly open mind that’s busy refining its view of life, literature and a great deal in between... Smith shows herself in more ways than one to be a very old, empathetic head on ridiculously young shoulders... It’s in her impassioned, compulsively dialectical and endearingly wonkish inquiry into literature that Smith really takes off.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“It doesn’t seem to matter what she’s writing about—Kafka, her father, Liberia, George Clooney. Just placing anything within the magnetic field of her restlessly intelligent brain is enough to make it fascinating. Smith (White Teeth) has the gift...of showing you how she reads and thinks; watching her do it makes you feel smarter and more observant just by osmosis.”—Time
 
“Warmly insightful pieces that tease apart knotty strands of human experience... She has an uncanny eye for detail, on the streets of Liberia or at an Oscar gala in Los Angeles.” —O Magazine