Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays - Hardcover

Smith, Zadie

3.83

6,009 ratings by Goodreads

9780670045280: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670045284 ISBN 13: 9780670045280

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2009

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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 on Katharine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or Zora Neale Hurston, she brings deft care to the art of criticism with a style both sympathetic and insightful. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny-a gift to readers and writers both.

How did George Eliot’s love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be overdressed for the Oscars? What is Italian feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? What does “soulful” mean? Is Date Movie the worst film ever made?

Smith’s questioning spirit passes these concerns and many more through a personal lens, creating a critcism that is scholarly but never solely academic, rigorous without turning dogmatic. Among the essays collected here: an account of a week in war-ravaged Liberia, a candid assessment of the strengths and flaws of E.M. Forster, a polemical discussion of two warring trends in the contemporary novel and a moving appreciation of the work and thought of David Foster Wallace. Here also are memoirs and movie reviews advice on the craft of writing and how to resolve a nightmare family Christmas, Iris Murdoch-style. Uniting the whole, a refreshing generosity of spirit and a bracing sense of humour.

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.

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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 the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, and of a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Smith is a graduate of Cambridge University and has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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