Changing My Mind Smith, Zadie

Divided into four sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, and Feeling--"Changing My Mind" features Smith''s wonderfully engaging essays on topics as diverse as literature, going to the Oscars, feminism, Obama, and Anna Magnani.

From the Publisher:
A volume of essays by the author of On Beauty is comprised of top-selected pieces from the past decade and considers a broad range of topics organized under such main categories as "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling."A volume of essays by the author of On Beauty is comprised of top-selected pieces from the past decade and considers a broad range of topics organized under such main categories as "Reading," "Being," "Seeing" and "Feeling."

Annotation:
In these lucid, candid, and ardent essays, novelist Zadie Smith (WHITE TEETH) discusses a wide variety of subjects including her father's death, her deep admiration for the late author David Foster Wallace, her family's love of British comedy, and her initial resistance to the work of Zora Neale Hurston that gradual became a deep appreciation.. Passionate rather than programmatic, intelligent without dogma, Smith's writing is wonderfully attuned to the swerves and shifts of life, even the life of the mind, and her essays prove how literature can change in its meaning over time, and the world can suddenly be seen in new lights. Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2009.

Praise

"Smith is a superb essayist of skill, candor, and caring....[She] has organized her sharp, funny, and agile essays into sections on reading, being, seeing, feeling, and remembering to create a string and piquant collection." - Donna Seaman 10/15/2009

"Whether writing about Foster Wallace, Forster or Zora Neale Hurston, Smith shows a deeply intellectual and continually evolving appreciation of literature....While her somewhat meandering tribute to Wallace and her season of movie reviews are filled with sharp insights, the book's real payoff comes in three essays about her 'gentle, sentimental' father, Harvey Smith, a salesman who died at 81 in 2006." - Heller McAlpin 11/11/2009

"Zadie Smith is the author of three novels of promise, precocity, and occasional brilliance. This collection of short nonfiction has many of the same virtues." - Thom Geier 11/20/2009

"Delightful, painful and spontaneously funny....Taken together, [these essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature and a great deal in between." - Ella Taylor 11/15/2009

"With a charming, erudite crankiness...[Smith] tries to sort out a world that is complicated, confounding and utterly more textured than the oversimplified version we sometimes choose to see....The self-deprecating Smith has said her fiction can come off as 'essay-like.' By contrast, her essays share one quality with good fiction. They reveal truths that facts alone can't quite explain." - Tyrone Beason 11/22/2009

BloomReach Content

Changing My Mind Occasional Essays (Hardcover)

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