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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays |  | Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $10.36
as of 3/21/2010 23:13 CDT details
You Save: $16.59 (62%)
New (45) Used (13) from $10.36
Seller: cubusa_books
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 17740
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition, First Printing
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 1594202370
Dewey Decimal Number: 824.914
EAN: 9781594202377
ASIN: 1594202370
Publication Date: November 12, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781594202377 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com 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
Product Description
A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith's nonfiction over the past decade.
Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.
Split into four sections-"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"-Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.
In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers-E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others-have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences-in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond-that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.
Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
A Great Read from a Brilliant Writer! March 12, 2010
BookWoman/BookMan TV REVIEWS (Nashville, Tn United States)
Zadie Smith, the award winning author of White Teeth, proves why she is one of our best writers in this collection of non-fiction essays. Smith opines on everything from deceased author David Foster Wallace to Katherine Hepburn and President Barack Obama. A great read."
 Zadie Smith essays February 1, 2010
Emory Holmes II
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
The book did not arrive in the timeframe I wanted; but when it came it was in perfect condition.
Excellent January 5, 2010
Mr. Steiner (New York)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the prominent novelists of the contemporary literature scene, but she is well on her way to establishing her reputation as a fine essayist. This collection of essays, gathered over the course of the last few years, proceed from erudite literature reviews, to politics, to film, and on to personal reflections from Smith's life. I found the pieces on literature the most compelling and brilliant; Smith's willingness to reassess her aesthetic commitments is a rare gift and an indicator of an active and sharp reader. Her review of David Foster Wallace's 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,' is a fabulous ode to the late writer and close friend of Smith. Here she is able to give a nuanced reading of what made DFW so elusive and mystifying a writer. The essays in this volume very in quality, and Smith is prone to the kind of obscure intellectualizing of which she is so suspicious. Never the less, this collection is the mark of an open and promising interpreter of literature and cultural matters as a whole. I look forward to future work.
A Remarkable Collection of Essays from a Great Modern Author January 1, 2010
The Cultural Observer
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
In "Crafty Feeling," one of the versatile and thought-provoking essays contained in Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind, the author confesses that whenever readers express admiration for White Teeth, she tries "to feel pleased, but it's a distant, disconnected sensation," and that the book and she "may never be reconciled." Coming from a writer who, while still an undergraduate wunderkind at Cambridge, carved her place among the literati with such a precocious debut novel, this revelation may come as something of a surprise. Indeed, while smatters of it can read as stylistically incoherent, White Teeth displays artistic traits surely coveted by the immature novelist--there is the precise musicality of her prose, a tonally secure authorial voice that easily dispenses with unmannered verbal pyrotechnics, and, most remarkably, an artistic philosophy that embraces the medium of fiction as a means of depicting themes of religion, race, and character.
Like the many pieces in this eclectic omnibus of thoughts, this essay communicates not only the intricacies of Smith's literary craft, but also unveils the inner workings of her dartingly gifted mind, tackling such conventionally cerebral topics like literary criticism, investigative journalism, and mini-memoir with the balances of wit and humor that charmed her critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Deeply personal and arrestingly candid, these pieces venture into the cultural and emotional waters that illuminated her previous works of fiction, for instance underscoring the influences imparted by Zora Neale Hurston's "unerringly strong and soulful" black characters in "Their Eyes Were Watching God : What Does Soulful Mean?" or expressing admiration for Barack Obama's polyphonic rhetoric in "Speaking in Tongues."
On a first glance though, Changing My Mind may read like free-form exercises on a dartboard of random ideas: recollections about her bittersweet relationship with her working-class, unread white father quickly segue into meditations on her brother's flair for stand-up comedy. Under the section "Seeing," Smith flexes her critical muscle and performs witty vivisections on mainstream cinema's blockbuster titles. Adjoining this is a cleverly articulated exposé about feminism revolving around Luchino Visconti's Bellissima, which sits beside an entertaining exegesis on Katharine Hepburn's iconic approaches to character while examining the "essential, Platonic and unindividuated" that graces Greta Garbo's features.
Elsewhere she writes about subjects as disparate as the power struggles pitted by Vladimir Nabokov's "bold assertion of authorial privilege" versus Roland Barthes' "authorial assassination"; Franz Kafka's surreal renderings as a by-product of his collective Jewishness; reflections on the bizarreness of Oscar weekend in Los Angeles; the "middling" sincerity of E.M Forster's writing; and the future novelistic paths paved by Joseph O'Neill's scintillating Netherland and Tom McCarthy's more daring experimental work, Remainder. Setting a slightly different key in this collection is the essay "One Week in Liberia," which reads like a tapered remastering of Ryszard Kapuscinski's artful journalistic expositions; and, in one of the more elegiac excerpts in this book, a most fitting tribute to the late David Foster Wallace.
Given the stark thematic differences explored throughout these essays, it understandably becomes difficult to find the common denominator that underlines this collection. For starters, it is apparent that Smith's writing is coziest when she dispatches with inquiries into literature and the authors who interest her. As a perceptive reader who also happens to be a remarkable fiction writer, she expresses in "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov" her inclinations for latter's author-biased "portrait of subjectivity" to the former's authorial independence. Although she attempts to reconcile both of these diametrically opposing views, she in the end finds greater rewards in the Russian author's highly involved approach. In expressing her deep affinity with Nabokov, the reader is assured that she is not merely knowledgeable about the devices behind his baroque flourishes and his playful puzzles, but that she grew and matured into Nabokov's artistic philosophy and his religious dedication to the art of reading and rereading.
When she recounts the grim state of contemporary English fiction, Smith contrasts Joseph O'Neill's more lyrical model with Tom McCarthy's stark one, enticing the reader to examine them from a holistic perspective, to place them in context of the artistic tradition, and, ultimately, to take note of how these innovations "shake the novel out of its present complacency." The essay, entitled "Two Directions for the Novel," rends one of this collection's most compelling reads and points to the author's promising future in literary criticism. In homage to one of the 21st century's most formidable prose stylists, Smith ably deconstructs the geometric complexities, the "formal, philosophical possibilities," and the linguistic manipulations of consciousness characteristic to David Foster Wallace's writing, highlighting his ability to shake the reader out of disbelief by inserting their psyche into the text.
But Smith also allows a bit of familiarity to penetrate the predominantly cerebral fabric of her writing, as evinced when culture and family are brought to the table. In discussing the virtues of Zora Neale Hurston, for example, Smith tells us that she initially resisted reading black authors due to the sentimentality, the "extraliterary feelings," and the stilted theories of the "Black Female Literary Tradition," declaring that, "I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count." She eventually comes to terms with Hurston's work, and acknowledges the universality of that certain weltschmerz, or, as with this particular case, the soulfulness, that aligns any reader with the pathos of Hurston's characters. And when she devotes space to three essays about her "gentle, sentimental" father, Harvey Smith, one recognizes the inspiration behind White Teeth's Archie Jones and his daughter who, by merit of her intellectual acuity, managed to wrest herself away from England's class limitations.
On the other hand, when Smith makes critical forays outside her element into film, one gets the feeling that she hasn't been able to fully get under the skin of the art form. While her perspicacious insights make her blockbuster movie reviews entertaining and witty, they can sometimes come off as jerry-built and annoyingly cute displays of winded English wit. And while the Vogue magazinesque "Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend" bear similarities with the more accomplished investigative piece, "One Week in Liberia," the self-conscious demeanor of the piece (which investigates the artifice that drenches Hollywood during the Oscars) renders something like a flat-footed imitation of a Dominic Dunne reportage.
In the end, all of these pieces do converge towards a central concept: to engage with Zadie Smith's thoughts and to involve ourselves in the process of savoring and creating written art. Whether she is discussing the vocal multiplicity of Obama's rhetoric, the fractal-like nature of Foster Wallace's syntax, Nabokov's game-master-like manipulation of prose, the pitch-perfect dialectics of black society, or the carefully constructed synthesis between body language and speech in film, these essays constantly impart Ms. Smith's attempts to retune and refine a reader's intuition and a writer's wisdom. If this essay collection seems at first riddled with "ideological inconsistency," ultimately, Changing My Mind addresses and embraces the credo of any great writer--that reading, and more importantly, reading well, is an invaluable precept to living.
Varied and brilliant, just like its author December 15, 2009
J. L. Faller (BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, US)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
If you love her fiction, you will enjoy the fact that Ms. Smith's voice is just as funny, insightful, unaffected and wise in her non-fiction essays. In this, which covers everything from the joys of reading Nabokov to Italian cinema, from the conditions of life in Liberia to her own relationship with her family and father, the reader gets to know aspects of her as a person, not merely as an author. It is instantly clear that she is not merely a dazzling writer, but an incredible human being, as well as a fine journalist and reviewer. She just "gets it", so get this book!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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