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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays [Paperback]

Zadie Smith
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
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Book Description

30 Jun 2011

Changing My Mind is a collection of essays by Zadie Smith on literature, cinema, art - and everything in between.

'A supremely good read. Smith writes about reading and writing with such infectious zeal and engaging accessibility that it makes you want to turn up at her house and demand tutoring' Dazed and Confused

'Alarmingly good' Metro

'Striding with open hearted zest and eloquence between fiction (from EM Forster to David Foster Wallace) and travel, movies and comedy, family and community in a self-portrait that charts the evolution of a formidable talent. In lovely elegiac pieces on her late father Harvey, D-Day veteran and Tony Hancock fan, Smith also delivers some of the most affecting autobiographical writing in any form' Independent, Books of the Year

'Brilliant. She's friendly and conspiratorial, voicing the kind of clever theories we could imagine ourselves holding if only we were as articulate as Zadie Smith' Vogue

'Fascinating. Smith has the gift of showing you how she reads and thinks; watching her do it makes you feel smarter and more observant. Her account of her struggles as an author may be the most authentic, unglamorous description of novel-writing ever put on paper' Time

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 has edited a short-story collection, The Book of Other People.


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Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (30 Jun 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0141019468
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141019468
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.8 x 19.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 34,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

About the Author

Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975, and still lives in the area. She is the author of White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, and the editor of The Book of Other People, all of which are published by Penguin.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Perspicatious and at times brilliant 22 Feb 2010
Format:Hardcover
A number of these essays fall into the category of literary criticism (lit. crit.) This is fine, as long as you have some familiarity with books or authors that are being "critiqued". If not, your appreciation might be less than full, although your curiosity might be piqued and you might be led to explore further. Zadie Smith's lit. crit. essays have a wide range so if,like me, you don't earn your bread from literary criticism some of the essays could be in unknown territory. However, you can pick ones on authors you know (e.g. for me, Forster, George Eliot, Kafka), and you will find Smith always offers perspicacity and instruction.
There are quite a few essays that are not in this category, or at least are only tangentially related to lit. crit. There is one brilliant essay, "Speaking in Tongues" (no. 9), which alone would justify buying the book. This essay starts from Shaw's Pygmalion, continues by way of Barack Obama, and shows the merits of being able to speak in many voices, to see things from multiple points of view. She points out that this is an ability which we cherish in artists but condemn in politicians. She holds up Shakespeare as a prime example of this quality, an author who is able to see from both sides: from black and white, male and female, king and commoner and so on.
The essays (nos. 15-18) on Zadie Smith's family are simultaneously touching and amusing. Smith's father comes across very warmly. Her account of her brother's career change into stand-up comedian shows great insight into this art. Smith's film reviews and the account of her visit to the Oscar weekend are also very entertaining.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars A Touch Too Hip 17 Dec 2012
By S Kemp
Format:Paperback
Changing My Mind is a middling collection of essays. There is great range but very little depth, and although Zadie Smith's interests and enthusiasms are contagious, the prose can be affectedly colloquial at times, a touch too hip. The essays roam over the various territories of literary criticism, film punditry, public lectures, reportage, memoir, and biography, all of which Smith competently handles. But despite her unmistakable voice, there are problems, and it's mostly a question of temperament and style.

Smith measures the power or merit of a work on its ability to rouse tears, and, by doing so, she's become the world's leading lachrymose critic. Smith cries when she finishes writing one of her own novels and when one of her favourite film stars dies. She also cried ('a lot') when she first read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and 'throughout the last fifteen minutes' of the film Tsotsi. Is this really a trustworthy response? Does the reader gain anything from these teary confessions? Not really. It smacks of hyperbole, which is unfortunate, as there are some truly perceptive and enlightening pieces in this volume.

The lecture 'Rereading Barthes and Nabokov' is magnificent, as is 'Two Directions for the Novel', the seminal New York Review of Books essay which rightfully caused a stir among the literati. 'That Crafty Feeling', a lecture devoted to the compositional processes of her novels, is a an intriguing insight into her methods, while 'Accidental Hero', an article on her father's wartime travails, is both funny and moving. But there are certain misfits. To make the book's chapter titles correspond to the type of writing or emotion ('Reading', 'Being', 'Seeing', 'Feeling', and 'Remembering') seems pointless.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith 30 May 2013
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Beautiful book, very well written as usual, very interesting essay on David Foster Wallace. I recommend it, you will only want to read more books !!
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2.0 out of 5 stars More grit, please; more oyster 13 Jun 2012
Format:Hardcover
As the title intimates, this is a shame-faced little outing. People thought the wunderkind could do anything, and more important, it would sell. On the last score, by Jiminy, I do believe they're right; this is pitched at the American market. Why, she even tells what are ostensibly Sunday Telegraph readers the plot of Brief Encounter!

After the somewhat slender lit crit bit (which I pick over in my review of the paperback) we get Too Much Information on the writer's self-inflicted travails (kind of self-help in reverse) and a grisly parody of travel writing, the listless, dutiful article on a country to which no-one would voluntarily travel; as a non-activist ourself we feel her discomfort. On accent and class she doesn't realise that as ALL children in these islands who haven't bunked off school ease into adulthood they have to 'find a voice' (it may take a while, but we don't end up with two); on blackness she's a bore (and a remarkably presumptuous one where American politics are concerned - can you imagine the situation in reverse?) She's never been a 'black writer' to me; is this even a meaningful concept? If she wishes to address black issues, well, so did Colin MacInnes. There are finally afroamerican poets coming on stream for whom colour is not an issue. Don't ask me to name them (I couldn't); they are - poets! Over the film writing best draw a veil. Two pieces stand out.
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