Changing My Mind
Occasional Essays
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." —Los Angeles Times
Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing on Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or Zora Neale Hurston, she brings deft care to the art of criticism with a style both sympathetic and insightful. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny--a gift to readers and writers both.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Zadie Smith’s voice—bright, incisive, humorous, and sly—is unmistakable in her works of fiction, and it transfers beautifully to nonfiction. Her fun-to-read collection of essays tackles subjects ranging from diversifying the literary canon to just how awesome Katharine Hepburn is. When Smith gets personal—recounting her experiences participating in a charity-backed trip to Liberia or watching her kid brother’s first stand-up set—her writing is just as thoughtful and considered as when she’s examining postmodern critical theory. An unexpected sense of fun permeates Changing My Mind. Puckish, intelligent, witty, and always thought-provoking, Smith erases the line between academia and pop culture.
