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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Oct 2019, 256 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2020, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Erin Lyndal Martin
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Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world.
Interleaving eleven completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.
Nothing is off limits, and everything—when captured by Smith's brilliant gaze—feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.
The Dialectic
"I would like to be on good terms with all animals," remarked the woman, to her daughter. They were sitting on the gritty beach at Sopot, looking out at the cold sea. The eldest boy had gone to the arcade. The twins were in the water.
"But you are not!" cried the daughter. "You are not at all!"
It was true. What the woman had said was true, in intention, but what the girl had said was true, too, in reality. The woman, though she generally refrained from beef, pork, and lamb, ate-with great relish-many other kinds of animals and fish, and put out flypaper in the summer in the stuffy kitchen of their small city apartment and had once (though her daughter did not know this) kicked the family dog. The woman had been pregnant with her fourth child, at the time, and temperamental. The dog seemed to her, at that moment, to be one responsibility too many.
"I did not say that I am. I said that I should like to be."
The daughter let out a cruel laugh.
"Words are cheap," she said.
Indeed...
Zadie Smith is a much-lauded writer known mostly for her novels; On Beauty was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and Swing Time was long-listed. Short fiction allows for a more experimental approach, which Smith takes advantage of in spades. Grand Union is a challenging, but rewarding reading experience...continued
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(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin).
In Zadie Smith's story "Downtown," characters mourn the closing of Café Loup. The West Village restaurant and bar, founded in 1977, had become a beloved institution to its loyal patrons when it was suddenly seized in September 2018 for over $100,000 in unpaid taxes. The tributes poured in immediately, as did the accounts of the spot's literary history.
Writer Sadie Stein penned an impassioned article of appreciation for Café Loup in the New Yorker. "No one went there for the food," she writes, an unusual assertion about a restaurant. The café, everyone agrees, was not just about community, but about being free to establish connections at a leisurely pace, or just quietly read a book if you didn't want to chat. Most of ...
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