In two very different collections, Zadie Smith and Marilynne Robinson each take on the central questions of our moment. Essay by David L. Ulin.
5
1
Hardcover(New Edition)
$28.00
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
28.0
In Stock
Overview
Winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Notable Book
From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays
Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
Arranged into five sections—In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free—this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network—and Facebook itself—really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."
Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive—and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.
Zadie Smith's new book, Grand Union, is on sale 10/8/2019.
A New York Times Notable Book
From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays
Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
Arranged into five sections—In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free—this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network—and Facebook itself—really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."
Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive—and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.
Zadie Smith's new book, Grand Union, is on sale 10/8/2019.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781594206252 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2018 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 464 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d) |
About the Author
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Hometown:
London, EnglandDate of Birth:
October 27, 1975Place of Birth:
Willesden, London, EnglandEducation:
B.A. in English, King's College at Cambridge University, 1998Read an Excerpt
Brother from Another Mother
The wigs on Key & Peele are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business. Individually made, using pots of hair clearly labeled— “Short Black/Brown, Human,” “Long Black, Human”—they are destined for the heads of a dazzling array of characters: old white sportscasters and young Arab gym posers; rival Albanian/ Macedonian restaurateurs; a couple of trash-talking, church-going, African-American ladies; and the President of the United States, to name a few. Between them, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele play all these people, and more, on their hit Comedy Central sketch show, now in its fourth season. (They are also the show’s main writers and executive producers.) They eschew the haphazard whatever’s-in-the-costume-box approach—enshrined by Monty Python and still operating on Saturday Night Live (SNL)—in favor of a sleek, cinematic style. There are no fudged lines, crimes against drag, wobbling sets, or corpsing. False mustaches do not hang limply: a strain of yak hair lends them body and shape. Editing is a three-month process, if not longer. Subjects are satirized by way of precise imitation—you laugh harder because it looks like the real thing. On one occasion, a black actress, a guest star on the show, followed Key into his trailer, convinced that his wig was his actual hair. (Key—to steal a phrase from Nabokov—is “ideally bald.”) “And she wouldn’t leave until she saw me take my hair off, because she thought that I and all the other guest stars were fucking with her,” he recalled. “She ’s, like, ‘Man, that is your hair. That’s your hair. You got it done in the back like your mama would do.’ I said, ‘I promise you this is glued to my head.’ And she was squealing with delight. She was going, ‘Oh! This is crazy! This is crazy!’ She just couldn’t believe it.” Call it method comedy.
The two men are physically incongruous. Key is tall, light brown, dashingly high-cheekboned and LA fit; Peele is shorter, darker, more rounded, cute like a teddy bear. Peele, who is thirty-five, wears a nineties slacker uniform of sneakers, hoodie and hipster specs. Key is fond of sharply cut jackets and shiny shirts—like an ad exec on casual Friday—and looks forty-three the way Will Smith looked forty-three, which is not much. Before he even gets near hair and makeup, Key can play black, Latino, South Asian, Native American, Arab, even Italian. He is biracial, the son of a white mother and a black father, as is Peele. But though Peele ’s phenotype is less obviously malleable—you might not guess that he ’s biracial at all— he is so convincing in voice and gesture that he makes you see what isn’t really there. His Obama impersonation is uncanny, and it’s the voice and hands, rather than the makeup lightening his skin, that allow you to forget that he looks nothing like the president. One of his most successful creations—a nightmarish, overly entitled young woman called Meegan—is an especially startling transformation: played in his own dark-brown skin, she somehow still reads as a white girl from the Jersey Shore.
Between chameleonic turns, the two men appear as themselves, casually introducing their sketches or riffing on them with a cozy intimacy, as if recommending a video on YouTube, where they are wildly popular. A sketch show may seem a somewhat antique format, but it turns out that its traditional pleasures—three-minute scenes, meme-like catchphrases—dovetail neatly with online tastes. Averaging 2 million on-air viewers, Key and Peele have a huge second life online, where their visually polished, byte-size, self- contained skits—easily extracted from each twenty-two-minute episode—rack up views in the many millions. Given these numbers, it’s striking how little online animus they inspire, despite their aim to make fun of everyone—men and women, all sexualities, any subculture, race or nation—in repeated acts of equal-opportunity offending. They don’t attract anything approaching the kind of critique a sitcom like Girls seems to generate just by existing. What they get, Peele conceded, as if it were a little embarrassing, is “a lot of love.” Partly, this is the license we tend to lend to (male) clowns, but it may also be a consequence of the antic freedom inherent in sketch, which, unlike sitcom, can present many different worlds simultaneously.
This creative liberty took on a physical aspect one warm LA morning in mid-November, as Key and Peele requisitioned half a suburban street in order to film two sketches in neighboring ranch houses: a domestic scene between Meegan and her lunkhead boyfriend, Andre (played by Key), and a genre spoof of the old Sidney Poitier classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “One of our bits makes you laugh? We have you, and you will back us up,” Peele suggested, during a break in filming. “And, if something offends you, you will excuse it.” Sitting at a trestle table in the overgrown back garden of “Meegan’s Home,” he was in drag, scarfing down lunch with the cast and crew, and yet—for a man wearing a full face of makeup and false eyelashes—he seemed almost anonymous among them, speaking in a whisper and gesturing not at all. On set, Peele is notably introverted, as mild and reasonable in person as he tends toward extremity when in character. Looking down at his cleavage, he murmured, “You often hear comments, as a black man, that there ’s something emasculating about putting on a dress. It may be technically true, but I’ve found it so fun. It’s not a downgrade in any way.”
When Key sat down beside Peele, he, too, seemed an unlikely shock merchant, although for the opposite reason. Outgoing, exhaustingly personable, he engages frenetically with everyone: discussing fantasy football with a cameraman, rhapsodizing about the play An Octoroon with his PR person and ardently agreeing with his comedy partner about the curious demise of the short-lived TV show Freaks and Geeks (“ahead of its time”), the present sociohistorical triumph of nerd culture, and a core comic principle underpinning many of their sketches. (“It’s what we call ‘peas in a pod’: two characters who feel just as passionate about the same thing.”)
Table of Contents
Foreword xi
Part I In the World 1
Northwest London Blues 3
Elegy for a Country's Seasons 14
Fenes: A Brexit Diary 20
On Optimism and Despair 35
Part II In the Audience 43
Generation Why? 45
The House That Hova Built 64
Brother from Another Mother 74
Some Notes on Attunement 100
Windows on the Will: Anomalisa 117
Dance Lessons for Writers 136
Part III In the Gallery 149
Killing Orson Welles at Midnight 151
Flaming June 160
"Crazy They Call Me": On Looking at Jerry Dantzic's Photos of Billie Holiday 164
Alte Frau by Balthasar Denner 173
Mark Bradford's Niagara 181
A Bird of Few Words: Narrative Mysteries in the Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye 187
The Tattered Ruins of the Map: On Sarah Sze's Centrifuge 201
Getting In and Out 212
Part IV On the Bookshelf 225
Crash by J. G. Ballard 227
The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi 236
Notes on NW 248
The Harper's Columns 251
The I Who Is Not Me 333
Part V Feel Free 349
Life-Writing 351
The Bathroom 354
Man Versus Corpse 366
Meet Justin Bieber! 381
Love in the Gardens 394
The Shadow of Ideas 406
Find Your Beach 420
Joy 427
Afterword 436
Picture Credits 437
Acknowledgments 438
Index 445
From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of