Changing My Mind – More Information
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. Whether writing of Obama, Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner’s care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful. CHANGING MY MIND is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny – a gift to readers and writers both. Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it’s a space in which to think freely.
Changing My Mind
Zadie Smith’s new book of criticism Changing My Mind is due for publication in Autumn of 2009.
Speaking in Tongues (text from NYRB)
1.
Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be—a case of bald social climbing—but at the time I genuinely thought this was the voice of lettered people, and that if I didn’t have the voice of lettered people I would never truly be lettered. A braver person, perhaps, would have stood firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please, but also because I didn’t quite see it as a straight swap, of this voice for that.
All In The Family (from the New Yorker)
In the Winter Fiction Issue, Zadie Smith writes about comedy and her family. Here she talks about her father’s love of “Fawlty Towers” and Spike Milligan, her brother, who performs standup under the stage name Doc Brown, and the difference between comedians and novelists.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.
Dead Man Laughing (from New Yorker)
My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. (more…)
Two Paths for the Novel (from NY Review)
Netherland
by Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon, 256 pp., $23.95
Remainder
by Tom McCarthy
Vintage, 308 pp., $13.95 (paper)
1.
From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, took seven years to write;Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher.
E.M. Forster, Middle Manager (from NYRB)
The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929–1960
edited by Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, with a foreword by P.N. Furbank
University of Missouri Press, 477 pp., $59.95
1.
In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety.
F. Kafka, Everyman (from NY Review)
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
by Louis Begley
Atlas and Co., 221 pp., $22.00
1.
How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:
The Book of Revelations (from guardian.co.uk)
Henry & George
In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It was an odd review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past and James hoped to be the future.
