Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of seeing Zadie Smith in person, reading from and discussing her latest novel, Swing Time, before a live audience in Montreal’s Rialto theatre. She was articulate and funny, passionate and spontaneous, but both […]

Zadie Smith’s NW

Zadie Smith’s latest novel NW, named for the postal code of the northwest London neighborhood in which it is set, follows the lives of four children of the fictional Garvey project buildings: Leah Hanwell, Felix Cooper, Keisha (renamed Natalie) Blake and […]

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

In her collection of essays Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith describes a line delivered by the actress Katharine Hepburn in the movie The Philadelphia Story as being her lodestar for fiction writing: “The time to make up your mind about people is […]

Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind

I am embarrassingly late to the works of Zadie Smith, having associated her with a younger generation of writers the literati seemed overly eager to promote. But then I read her essay on Kafka for the New York Review of Books, […]