Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Zadie Smith, the award winning author of White Teeth, proves why she is one of our best writers in this collection of non-fiction essays. Smith opines on everything from deceased author David Foster Wallace to Katherine Hepburn and President Barack Obama. A great read."

In "Crafty Feeling," one of the versatile and thought-provoking essays contained in Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind, the author confesses that whenever readers express admiration for White Teeth, she tries "to feel pleased, but it's a distant, disconnected sensation," and that the book and she "may never be reconciled." Coming from a writer who, while still an undergraduate wunderkind at Cambridge, carved her place among the literati with such a precocious debut novel, this revelation may come as something of a surprise. Indeed, while smatters of it can read as stylistically incoherent, White Teeth displays artistic traits surely coveted by the immature novelist--there is the precise musicality of her prose, a tonally secure authorial voice that easily dispenses with unmannered verbal pyrotechnics, and, most remarkably, an artistic philosophy that embraces the medium of fiction as a means of depicting themes of religion, race, and character. Like the many pieces in this eclectic omnibus of thoughts, this essay communicates not only the intricacies of Smith's literary craft, but also unveils the inner workings of her dartingly gifted mind, tackling such conventionally cerebral topics like literary criticism, investigative journalism, and mini-memoir with the balances of wit and humor that charmed her critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Deeply personal and arrestingly candid, these pieces venture into the cultural and emotional waters that illuminated her previous works of fiction, for instance underscoring the influences imparted by Zora Neale Hurston's "unerringly strong and soulful" black characters in "Their Eyes Were Watching God : What Does Soulful Mean?" or expressing admiration for Barack Obama's polyphonic rhetoric in "Speaking in Tongues." On a first glance though, Changing My Mind may read like free-form exercises on a dartboard of random ideas: recollections about her bittersweet relationship with her working-class, unread white father quickly segue into meditations on her brother's flair for stand-up comedy. Under the section "Seeing," Smith flexes her critical muscle and performs witty vivisections on mainstream cinema's blockbuster titles. Adjoining this is a cleverly articulated exposé about feminism revolving around Luchino Visconti's Bellissima, which sits beside an entertaining exegesis on Katharine Hepburn's iconic approaches to character while examining the "essential, Platonic and unindividuated" that graces Greta Garbo's features. Elsewhere she writes about subjects as disparate as the power struggles pitted by Vladimir Nabokov's "bold assertion of authorial privilege" versus Roland Barthes' "authorial assassination"; Franz Kafka's surreal renderings as a by-product of his collective Jewishness; reflections on the bizarreness of Oscar weekend in Los Angeles; the "middling" sincerity of E.M Forster's writing; and the future novelistic paths paved by Joseph O'Neill's scintillating Netherland and Tom McCarthy's more darin

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!

As always, Smith writes not just with brain and spine, as her hero Nabokov urged, but with stomach too and heart and funny bone. Divided into five (not four) sections entitled "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering", the collection is eclectic, including travel journalism, family histories and movie reviews, which range from blow-your-mind brilliant to, in one or two cases, a little flat. But - and this is not a sentence you get to write too often - it's the lit crit that really sparkles. The essays about consuming and producing literature are what will earn this book a place on the shelf of every serious creative reader and writer. I loved, and learned from and yes, had my mind changed by, their forensic effervescence. From The Creative Intelligence Blog by Orna Ross, author Lovers' Hollow & A Dance in Time

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."