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Essays
by Zadie Smith
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.
In the past two decades, few writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.
This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith's dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.
With an eye toward the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.
"Novelist and critic Smith brings an incisive eye and keen wit to art, music, fiction, politics, and more in this wide-ranging essay collection...Smith delivers original insights couched in sly, artful prose...Readers will be rewarded by this unforgettable collection." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A thoughtful, deft collection." —Kirkus Reviews
"Smith is a consummate and perpetual essayist. Her fourth collection contains 30 penetrating, nimble, witty, and affecting pieces, most from the past half-dozen years...A treasury of candid, thoughtful, caring, and exhilarating inquiries." —Booklist
"This is Smith's most consequential publication in years ... In Dead and Alive, Smith returns to essay-writing with a hammer." —BookPage
This information about Dead and Alive was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; four collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, Intimations, and Dead and Alive; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and a play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
Name Pronunciation
Zadie Smith: zay-dee
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