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 of Obama, Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner’s care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful.
Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny – a gift to readers and writers both. Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it’s a space in which to think freely.
Praise For Changing My Mind
“This thoughtful collection of 17 essays swings from her family and feminism to bad movies and great books; Smith writes about it all with the insight and wit that made her a literary sensation.”
—Chatelaine
“Nirvana for essay nerds.”
—The Globe and Mail
“A marvel.”
—National Post
“These essays benefit from restless intellectual energy.”
—The Toronto Star |