A.V. Club (Free subscription) | yesterday
In the foreword to Zadie Smith’s first non-fiction collection, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays , the author of White Teeth taunts readers with a series of other projects she’s considered, including a serious book about writing called Fail Better . Fans of her three novels may hold her responsible for not following any of these threads, but even readers unfamiliar with her work will...
About Literature: Contemporary (Free subscription) | 16 hours ago
The best literature of 2009 includes A.S. Byatt's sprawling historical novel, a collection of short stories from Wells Tower, Nick Hornby's musical love story, and a book of essays from Zadie Smith. Check out our list of the Top 10 books of 2009 . The Ten Best Books of 2009 originally appeared on About.com Contemporary Literature on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 10:30:38. Permalink | Comment |...
reeling and writhing (Free subscription) | yesterday
In the Guardian last weekend Peter Conrad had glowing things to say of Zadie Smith's essay collection, Changing My Mind:Occasional Essays (which will hit our shelves around December 1, in time for holiday reading.) I particularly like her remarks, quoted...
New English Review/The Iconoclast (Free subscription) | yesterday
Yes, Zadie Smith is a bit pretentious and very overrated, but does she deserve this? Peter Conrad, a goblin in the Guardian, sinks his white teeth into her latest book. Then rolls it around on his tongue, slurps, gasps, smacks his lips and burps: For Zadie Smith, criticism is a bodily pleasure, not an abstracted mental operation. Reading, like eating, caters to her ravenous but discriminating appetite:...
The Wooden Spoon (Free subscription) | yesterday
At The Guardian , Zadie Smith writes about what she calls 'novel-nausea', framed as something what might be called a review, of Reality Hunger by ex-novelist David Shields. Smith writes, 'The pages are filled with anti-fiction fighting talk: "The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe."...
Ask Nicola (Free subscription) | yesterday
Zadie Smith talks about the essay in the Guardian : For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: "A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition." And if this looks to us like one of Johnson's lexical eccentricities, we're chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement ("The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays")...
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | yesterday
Very interesting essay by Zadie Smith (who has a new book of essays out). First she introduces a new literary manifesto, Reality Hunger An excited American writing student gave me a proof copy of the book, and during a recent semester spent teaching I met many students equally enthused by Shields's ideas. Of course, it's easy to be cynical about this kind of student enthusiasm. Generally speaking,...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
"Squeezed between an almighty concrete cinema complex at one end and a giant intersection at the other, Cricklewood was no kind of place. It was not a place a man came to die. It was a place a man came in order to go other places via the A41." Ouch. To make matters worse, that stinging description of a London suburb comes from a local girl. Double ouch. What Zadie Smith sets out in the opening...
Bibliobibuli (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
Really, my apologies for not being a very good blogger over the last week or two. I'm not sure what's happened to me, but I seem to be more easily distractible than usual. (I just spent 20 minutes getting distracted by this nice blog while looking to see if I had spelt the word right!). This being the case, I offer you some quick links to stories that have caught my eye over the last week or two and...
The Tart of Fiction / FictionBitch (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
A post on Katy Evans-Bush's blog reminded me tonight that I hadn't yet read Zadie Smith's Guardian essay on the essay, and I went and did so. I commend to you this article, in which Zadie acknowledges the reality of 'novel-nausea', a sickness with the artificiality of novels in general (which Katy, it seems, strongly shares) and conventional novels in particular, but takes issue with the total condemnation...
Baroque in Hackney (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
So… Zadie Smith is publishing – that is, she has written, so Hamish Hamilton is publishing – a book of essays, and thus has essayed to write an essay about it, which is in yesterday’s Guardian. Most of her essay is about the essays of one David Shields, whose book of essays on the essay [...]
Tom Conoboy's Writing Blog (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
Another foray into the 'end of the novel' debate, this time by Zadie Smith in The Guardian . It's a very good essay, thought provoking and, although I don't fully go along with her, she makes some excellent points. Her starting point is the apparent coincidence of a number of authors - Foer, Drabble, Achebe - writing essays recently, rather than fiction. Why', she wonders. She then refers to a forthcoming...
Gene Expression (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
Perhaps because we only remember the good stuff? Or only he good suff & famous authors get reprinted. I'm prompted to offer this hypothesis in response to Chad Orzel's commentary that there was a lot of bad space opera even during the "Golden Age" of science fiction. I recall that Zadie Smith once noted that 99.99% (or something to that effect) of Victorian fiction is forgotten and out...
escapegrace (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
Zadie Smith wonders what essays offer to a novelist : Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the...
Phronesisaical (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
Essay or novel? Zadie Smith. Congress gets around to considering whether all those military contractors can be held responsible for their actions. Irtysh River, North Kazakhstan, dawn. Imagine a cuckoo and a million other birds singing. Tug of war over the Irtysh River's water. More background here . If you want to read only one rant on Sarah Palin, this is it . Who runs Russia, anyway? It seems to...
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emmabakker | 10/30/2007
London , 30 October, 2007 - Paranormal documentaries are topping UK DVD charts, according to online swapping site Hitflip. The supernatural Hollywood blockbusters are also proving well-loved amongst online swappers in the run up to Halloween. Various series of Most Haunted, Most Haunted Live and Ghost Towns are the most popular DVDs that exchange hands on the Hitflip site. In addition, Britons chose...
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