Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

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In "Changing My Mind" Zadie Smith, author of "White Teeth" and "On Beauty", provides thought-provoking and inspiring essays on a variety of subjects. Here, Zadie Smith asks in what ways Barack Obama is like Eliza Doolittle, whether you can be over-dressed for the Oscars, and, if Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? Split into sections 'Reading', 'Being', 'Seeing', 'Feeling' and 'Remembering', in this engaging collection of essays - some published here for the first time - Zadie Smith casts an acute eye over material both personal and cultural, revealing herself as a passionate and precise essayist, equally athome in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy. Full of sympathetic and insightful criticism, and journalism at its most expansive, Zadie Smith's "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" is a gift to readers and writers both. "Just placing anything within the magnetic field of her restlessly intelligent brain is enough to make it fascinating". ("Time"). "Sparkling ...she breaks the rules established by the black-gowned nerds in universities who kill books by dissecting them". ("Observer"). "Some of the most affecting autobiographical writing in any form this year". (Boyd Tonkin, "Independent" (Books of the Year)). "Makes you want to turn up at her house and demand tutoring". ("Dazed and Confused"). "The elegy for Foster Wallace is worth the cover price in itself". ("Scotland on Sunday"). "Alarmingly good". ("Metro"). Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her debut novel, "White Teeth", won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize, and was included in "Time" 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Her second novel, "On Beauty", was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has written two further novels, "The Autograph Man" and "NW", a collection of essays "Changing My Mind", and also edited short story anthology "The Book of Other People". Zadie Smith was chosen by "Granta" as one of its twenty best young British novelists in 2003, and as well as to "Granta" has contributed writing to the "New Yorker" and the "Guardian". Zadie Smith's new novel, "NW", is available from September 2012.