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.

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.

Animals

Zadie Smith reads Frank O’Hara’s Animals at Coudal.com

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days