num_pages: 320
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 sectionsReading Being Seeing and FeelingChanging 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 writersE. M. Forster Zora Neale Hurston George Eliot and othershave 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 experiencesin novels travel philosophy politics and beyondthat 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.
language: English
title: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
publisher: The Penguin Press HC