Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays [Hardcover]

Zadie Smith (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 12, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2009: One of Zadie Smith's great gifts as a novelist is her openness: both to character and ideas in her stories, and to what a novel itself should be. That she's a novelist was clear as soon she broke through with White Teeth in her early twenties, but what kind she'll be (or will be next) seems open to change. Which all, along with her consistent intelligence, grace, and wit, makes her an ideal essayist too, especially for the sort of "occasional essays" collected for the first time in Changing My Mind. She can make the case equally for the cozy "middle way" of E.M. Forster and the most purposefully demanding of David Foster Wallace's stories, both as a reader and, you imagine, as a writer who is considering their methods for her own. The occasions in this book didn't only bring her to write about writers, though: she also investigates, among other subjects, Katherine Hepburn, Liberia, and Barack Obama (through the lens of Pygmalion), and, in the collection's finest piece, recalls her late father and their shared comedy snobbery. One wishes more occasions upon her. --Tom Nissley

About the Author

ZADIE SMITH was born in northwest London in 1975. She is the author of White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, Changing My Mind, and NW.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; First Edition edition (November 12, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594202370
• ISBN-13: 978-1594202377
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #389,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Zadie Smith was born in North West London in 1975 and continues to live in the area. She is currently working on a second novel.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant and Thoughtful Essays November 30, 2009

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

In addition to her considerable talents as a novelist, Zadie Smith has been quietly assembling an impressive body of literary and cultural criticism over the past several years. Those pieces have been collected in this volume, a virtuosic demonstration of the workings of a first-class mind expressed in consistently lucid prose. Smith, who divides her time between New York and London, is an acute observer of contemporary culture, possessed also with the intellectual grounding to make her commentaries more than ephemera.

The first section of the volume consists of six scholarly essays on writers like Zora Neale Hurston (one of her early literary inspirations), Nabokov and Barthes, George Eliot, E.M. Forster and Kafka. The most intriguing (and perhaps controversial) piece in this section is one entitled "Two Directions for the Novel," in which she contrasts the lyrical realism of Joseph O'Neill's lavishly praised NETHERLAND with her preference for the "constructive deconstruction" of English novelist Tom McCarthy's experimental REMAINDER.

Smith's lecture, "Speaking in Tongues," the highlight of a section entitled "Being," is a moving meditation delivered only a few weeks after the election of Barack Obama. More than any other essay in the collection, this one puts her dazzling talents on full display. In it, she moves gracefully from the story of shedding the accent of her birth ("Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle.") to a discussion of Pygmalion, to an incisive dissection of Obama's memoir. Along the way, she discourses on such subjects as Shakespeare, the religious wars of 17th-century England and Cary Grant. None of this feels as if it's calculated to showcase her erudition. Rather, it's an invigorating display of the breadth of her learning and of her ability to knit together seamlessly elements of culture both high and low.

A close study of Smith's generous essay "That Crafty Feeling" (a version of a lecture delivered to Columbia creative writing students) will repay aspiring writers many times over. In it, she lays down 10 genial guidelines about the writing craft, of which this terse admonition about literary influences is but one example: "Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write...Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going."

The three essays collected under the heading "Feeling" are the most poignant in the book. Smith begins with a description of a family Christmas around 1980 (she was six or so at the time), and then in "Accidental Hero" recounts her father Harvey's wartime memories, including his participation in D-Day ("So much experience that should be parceled out, tenderly, over years, came to my father that day, concertinaed into twenty-four hours.") and concludes with "Dead Man Laughing," a sly meditation that winds its way effortlessly from the gentle fun she pokes at her father's sense of humor (he loved "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "Fawlty Towers") to a professional critique of the art of comedy.

Smith's collection winds up with a lengthy reconsideration of David Foster Wallace's short story collection, BRIEF LIVES OF HIDEOUS MEN. In the same vein as the literary criticism that leads off the volume, it's a discussion that will challenge the general reader, but it's an unsurpassed introduction to Wallace's work and an exceptionally generous tribute to a departed colleague.

The only section of CHANGING MY MIND that mildly disappoints is "Seeing." Focusing on the movies, Smith offers an appreciation of Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, a profile of the Italian actress Anna Magnani and a series of vignettes from Oscar weekend 2006. The longest piece in this section collects Smith's reviews of mainstream films that year. The problem with this relatively lengthy chunk of the book is that a good many of the films Smith critiques (such as the ghastly Get Rich or Die Tryin' and Date Movie) are best forgotten and, in any event, unworthy of her talents.

In a recent essay in the Guardian, Zadie Smith explains that something she calls "novel nausea" inspired her to turn to the essay form. "But in a strange circular effect, it has been the experience of writing essays that has renewed my enthusiasm for the things fiction does that nothing else can," she concludes. "Writing essays on Kafka, on Nabokov, on George Eliot, on Zora Neale Hurston, I was newly humbled and excited by the artificial and the fully imagined." It's reassuring to know that a gifted writer of fiction now has recharged her creative batteries, but these elegant and thoughtful essays can only inspire the hope that she'll return with more soon.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent January 4, 2010

By Steiner VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the prominent novelists of the contemporary literature scene, but she is well on her way to establishing her reputation as a fine essayist. This collection of essays, gathered over the course of the last few years, proceed from erudite literature reviews, to politics, to film, and on to personal reflections from Smith's life. I found the pieces on literature the most compelling and brilliant; Smith's willingness to reassess her aesthetic commitments is a rare gift and an indicator of an active and sharp reader. Her review of David Foster Wallace's 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,' is a fabulous ode to the late writer and close friend of Smith. Here she is able to give a nuanced reading of what made DFW so elusive and mystifying a writer. The essays in this volume very in quality, and Smith is prone to the kind of obscure intellectualizing of which she is so suspicious. Never the less, this collection is the mark of an open and promising interpreter of literature and cultural matters as a whole. I look forward to future work.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Varied and brilliant, just like its author December 15, 2009

By J. L. Faller

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you love her fiction, you will enjoy the fact that Ms. Smith's voice is just as funny, insightful, unaffected and wise in her non-fiction essays. In this, which covers everything from the joys of reading Nabokov to Italian cinema, from the conditions of life in Liberia to her own relationship with her family and father, the reader gets to know aspects of her as a person, not merely as an author. It is instantly clear that she is not merely a dazzling writer, but an incredible human being, as well as a fine journalist and reviewer. She just "gets it", so get this book!