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15 great essays by zadie smith, sweet charity, words and writing, speaking in tongues, the rise of the essay, that crafty feeling, dance lessons for writers by zadie smith, on killing charles dickens by zadie smith, sex and wheels by zadie smith, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

The Secret History of Black England by Zadie Smith

Some notes on attunement by zadie smith, dead man laughing, you are in paradise, changing my mind.

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Feel Free: Essays Audio CD – Audiobook, February 13, 2018

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• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Audio
• Publication date February 13, 2018
• Dimensions 5.1 x 1.3 x 5.7 inches
• ISBN-10 0525528733
• ISBN-13 978-0525528739
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Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Audio; Unabridged edition (February 13, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525528733
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525528739
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 1.3 x 5.7 inches
• #23,814 in Essays (Books)
• #57,792 in Literary Movements & Periods
• #77,576 in Books on CD

About the author

Zadie smith.

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations, and a collection of short stories, Grand Union.

White Teeth won multiple 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. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

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Customers find the essays in the book sharp, moving, and perceptive. They describe the book as terrific, brilliant, and well-crafted. Readers also praise the writing quality as beautiful and stylistic.

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"...Zadie Smith is an author of masterful questions and discussions . Her writings are the friend you wish to discuss your ideas with...." Read more

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Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith has contributed numerous short stories, profiles, essays, and personal histories to The New Yorker since her story “ Stuart ” was published in the magazine in 1999, when she was twenty-four. Her body of work includes essays, short stories, and novels, such as “ White Teeth ”; “ On Beauty ,” which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction; “ Swing Time ”; and “ The Fraud ,” which came out in 2023. Fiction, Smith argues , is “a medium that must always allow itself . . . the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths.” Her stories are full of those truths, whether she’s imagining an immigrant living in servitude in London, villagers held hostage by armed strangers, British tourists drifting down a lazy river, or an unrepentant Billie Holiday near the end of her life.

Selected Stories

Now More Than Ever

The Embassy of Cambodia

Two Men Arrive in a Village

Escape from New York

All fiction.

The Lazy River

Crazy They Call Me

Moonlit Landscape with Bridge

Meet the President!

About the Author

A Glimpse of Zadie Smith

Dead Man Laughing

More by the author.

The Role of Words in the Campus Protests

The Fall of My Teen-Age Self

On Killing Charles Dickens

The Genius of Toni Morrison’s Only Short Story 

New yorker podcasts.

Zadie Smith Reads “Now More Than Ever”

Zadie Smith Reads “The Lazy River”

Zadie Smith Reads “Crazy They Call Me”

Zadie Smith Reads “Two Men Arrive in a Village”

Introducing The Author’s Voice: New Fiction from The New Yorker

Zadie Smith’s Book of Essays Explores What It Means to Be Human

The varieties of individuality in “feel free”.

“If I have any gift at all,” Zadie Smith admits in one of the essays in Feel Free , “it’s for dialogue—that trick of breathing what-looks-like-life into a collection of written sentences.” Smith does voices. Sometimes literally: an audio recording of her reading her story “Escape from New York,” includes the treat that is impressions of its three characters, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor. Her fiction, of course, is full of voices, but the rendering of this familiar trio and their escape occupies that fertile gray area somewhere between entirely real and entirely fabricated. It isn’t mimicry, which leads nowhere, but a curious sort of imaginary impersonation, which leads everywhere.

Imaginary impersonation sounds like a purely fictional mode, yet it’s the way she approaches all writing, which brings together “three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.” It is these three, she tells us in her introduction, that constitute writing “(for me)”. The parentheses are important because it’s the final category that’s the real kicker. Selfhood—other people’s—is what she returns to again and again, through what else but her own shifting and brilliant subjectivity. So it is that instead of a straight “introductory essay for a book of Billie Holiday photos,” Smith writes a bravura monologue, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism. Tellingly, it’s in the second person: Zadie-as-Billie-as-“you”.

In fact—though many aren’t hip to this yet—not only is there no more Eleanora, there isn’t any Billie either. There is only Lady Day. Alligator bag, three rows of diamonds nice and thick on your wrist—never mind that it’s three o’ clock in the afternoon. You boil an egg in twinset and pearls.

“I did try to write an essay about Billie,” Smith admits in a glum little shrug of a footnote, “but every angle seemed too formal or cold.” When your subject presents herself to you with the intimacy of a first name, and when that “you” identifies as a “sentimental humanist” it would only be a travesty to respond with the detachment of cool appraisal.

Smith’s great fascination with selfhood rests in its contingency. In an essay on the artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye , who paints anonymous, elegant black figures, Smith quotes the painter Chris Ofili. Responding to the intimacy of the paintings, Ofili had marveled at, “the tightness of her bun. The size of his ear. She knew so much about so little about him. She said so little he heard so much.” “Exactly,” Smith enthuses, taking up where Ofili left off. “Here are some paintings of he and she, him and her. They say little, explicitly, but you hear so much.” Ofili, in these elliptical sentences, leaps from small, specific and personal details, to some felt, relational truth, and this is very much Smith’s mode as both fiction writer and critic.

Noting the New Museum show’s red walls, a color that strikes her as being redolent of “the calico covers of nineteenth-century novels,” Smith proposes that the color “has the effect of bringing a diverse selection of souls together, framing and containing them, much like a novel contains its people, which is to say, only partially.” It’s this partial containment, the generosity it grants, that appears to yield this next impression. The paintings “seem to have souls—that ultimate retrogressive term!—though by “soul” we need to imply nothing more metaphysical here than the sum total of one person’s affect in the mind of another.”

This definition of soul, “one person’s affect in the mind of another” resonates throughout the collection, and finds full expression when Smith considers Justin Bieber in relation to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. “Meet Justin Bieber!” is a very funny essay but it it also, and this is the quiet miracle of it, wholly intellectually sound. Bieber, as Smith puts it with benign provocation, “is still not yet a person,” since (quoting Buber) “Individuality makes its appearance by being differentiated from other individualities.” Bieber, the globally famous love object, “meets only those who feel they have already met him, and already love him.” Unlike, say, an encounter between Bieber and one of his fans at a corporate meet-and-greet in a stadium, this imaginary meeting between Bieber and Buber in Smith’s essay means something. It aspires, in fact, toward Buber’s own definition of meeting, which Smith renders as, “an intimate, complex, and precious state, a state we achieve only rarely.”

Elsewhere, in an essay that discusses both Charlie Kaufman’s genius stop-motion film Anomalisa and Schopenhauer, Smith writes : “I waited in the dark for something not quite human—and all too human—to begin.” There is an artistic generosity to the category of “not quite human and all too human.” This is the territory of fiction: The three dead celebrities reanimated as versions of themselves in “Escape from New York” are not quite human and all too human. So is the persuasive reality of an anonymous, made-up woman’s bun in a painting. Likewise, the puppets in Anomalisa, with their arrestingly lifelike eyes yet visible seams are “mixture of artifice and realism”.

This, too, speaks to the notion of “The I Who Is Not Me”, the title of an essay on writing in the first person. 2016’s Swing Time marked a departure from the third person. There is a certain comfort in writing at one remove from characters, but there is also an implicit political imperative. Considering her third novel, 2005’s On Beauty, Smith writes: “This is the kind of fiction I have always loved to write and read: worming itself into many different bodies, many different lives. Fiction that faces outwards, toward others.” Fiction, in other words, that is generative, freeing, to both writer and reader. But writing in the first person offers an alternative version of freedom: “ It creates a space that allows for the writer’s experience and the reader’s simultaneously, a world in which Portnoy is at once entirely Philip Roth and not Philip Roth at all. That sounds like an impossible identity, but literature, for me, is precisely the ambivalent space in which impossible identities are made possible, both for their authors and their characters.”

It’s in impossible identities that we find freedom. And then comes a litany of names, first names whose surnames are implicit (as with “Billie” earlier), names that each conjure up many voices, their own voice and their characters’s voices and their literary antecedents,’ and then the overarching voice, the “voice” of their individuality: “I am Philip, I am Colson, I am Jonathan,” Smith announces, “I am Rivka, I am Virginia, I am Sylvia, I am Zora, I am Chinua, I am Saul, I am Toni, I am Nathan, I am Vladimir, I am Leo, I am Albert, I am Chimamanda.”

She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do. At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves. The philosophical experiment of “doing” all these other voices, comes from her own recognition of herself as a biracial British child of the 70s: “Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity,” she writes, “can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.” Who we are is, to a great degree, chance. We so easily could have been someone else. As one character says in White Teeth, “Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies.”

In her celebrated essay “Joy” , Smith writes that one source of daily pleasure for her is “other people’s faces”—their specificity, the irreducibly human individuality therein, nobody’s but their own. The subtlest joy of these essays is sensing Smith’s own personhood, a personhood inseparable from her intellectual life. The self encompasses both. After the bracing dynamics of so much thought, the essays in Feel Free leave the reader not with a succinct theory of metaphysical dialogue between a global pop phenomenon and twentieth-century philosopher, but rather an image: the endearing, enduring image of one of our finest public intellectuals bickering with her husband, in a car, as she hankers for a sausage roll.

Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Virtue and Neon In Daylight.

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Zadie Smith’s new book of essays proves she’s as great a critic as she is a novelist

Feel Free is an ecstatic celebration of the unknowable self.

by Constance Grady

“I realize my somewhat ambivalent view of human selves is wholly out of fashion,” Zadie Smith writes apologetically in the introduction to her new essay collection, Feel Free .

Smith isn’t lying. Her way of thinking about the self — in a collection of essays that cover everything from Smith’s childhood to literary criticism to Justin Bieber — does feel oddly abstract and academic for 2018. But it’s also valuable.

Over the course of the book, Smith repeatedly describes the self as a malleable and porous construct with boundaries subject to change, in the post-modernist literary tradition — but now, she warns, that may no longer be a valid construct.

These essays were written during the Obama era, Smith explains, when the apparent triumph of cosmopolitanism made it possible to think of the self in that way. Post-Trump, post-Brexit, she writes, the idea of an unstable self appears to be an unimaginable luxury, as “millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire with air.”

Smith offers up Feel Free as a reminder of a freedom she believes is now lost and must be fought for once again — namely, the freedom to not imagine yourself to be a wholly knowable and known being (I think therefore I am, I experience the world in a certain way and that experience is measurable and empirically true). She longs for the days when anyone could experience themselves as an unstable, subjective creature who has created a lot of very nice fictions about a fundamentally unknowable world in order to cope with it, and who may very well change those fictions at any given moment.

It’s that freedom that allows Smith to experience herself, variously, as a Moor in Venice (“A historically unprecedented Moor. A late-capitalism Moor. A tourist Moor.”), as a corpse (“We may be forever corpses — but once we were alive!”), and, most ecstatically, as the authors of the words she reads:

Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature. I am Philip, I am Colson, I am Jonathan, I am Rivka, I am Virginia, I am Sylvia, I am Zora, I am Chinua, I am Saul, I am Toni, I am Nathan, I am Vladimir, I am Leo, I am Albert, I am Chimamanda — but how easily I might have been somebody else, with their feelings and preoccupations, with their obsessions and flaws and virtues. This to me is the primary novelistic impulse: this leap into the possibility of another life.

That last passage comes from the most ambitious essay in Feel Free , titled “The I Who Is Not Me.” It’s this anthology’s answer to “ Two Paths for the Novel ,” the most celebrated essay in Smith’s previous collection Changing My Mind , and it examines the role of the autobiographical in fiction, particularly in first-person fiction.

Smith herself avoided the first-person perspective for most of her career, until she wrote her most recent novel, Swing Time . But Swing Time is explicitly ambivalent about its first-person-ness: The book’s unnamed, shadowy narrator deliberately avoids letting herself be intimately known to the reader, and she is given to trying to think about herself in the third-person, which she considers to be “a very elegant attitude.”

• Zadie Smith is our greatest novelist of race, class, and gender. Swing Time proves it.

In Feel Free ’s “The I Who Is Not Me,” Smith herself admits to a kind of “moral queasiness” around the first person, which she attributes her British upbringing. “The first-person voice,” she writes, tongue-in-cheek, “presents itself as a kind of indulgence, a narcissistic weakness, which the French and the Americans go in for, perhaps, but not the British, or not very often.”

She eventually chose to embrace the first-person anyway, she writes, because of its enormous immediacy, its ability to seamlessly create a fictional reality. “What a freedom I felt,” she writes, “constructing this entirely false autobiography which still, at every turn, sounded real, because I had allowed myself to write ‘I’ and in this way falsely insist on its truth. Quite a lot of the time as I wrote this book [ Swing Time ] I felt a little scandalous.”

By creating a first-person narrator, Smith argues, she has created another self, one who she experiences as an “I-who-is-not-me,” but who her readers might interpret as “I-whom-I-presume-is-you”; that is, as an avatar of Smith herself. And for Smith, the novel is the space in which those two I’s can reconcile themselves with one another, because “literature,” she writes, “is precisely the ambivalent space in which impossible identities are made possible, both for authors and their characters.”

In 2018, it can be tempting to react to Smith’s claims about the power of the novel to free us from ourselves with a cynically raised eyebrow: It’s all very well and good to mess around with make-believe people, we might say, but in the meantime, the world is ending, haven’t you heard? And Smith herself seems mildly embarrassed by the vaguely decadent idea of worrying about art and the boundaries of self when there is so much going wrong in the world.

But witnessing the freedom of Smith’s brilliant, erudite mind at work and at play makes its own argument. There is an immense aesthetic pleasure to be had in tagging along as she worries her way through a train of thought, whether that train of thought concerns Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne or the beer billboard across the street from her apartment or the way Justin Bieber illustrates philosopher Martin Buber’s I/thou relationship (those boundaries of self again!).

In contrast, the political essays she includes in Feel Free (they comprise four of the total 31 essays) can seem banal. They are more or less centrist liberal orthodoxy without new insight: public libraries and public schools are both good things, she argues, and fences — both metaphorical and liberal — are not. This is certainly a worthy idea, but it is not as exciting or original as Smith’s looping, contradictory ruminations on the role of the first-person voice in fiction.

If Smith had to turn away from her ideas about the self and the aesthetic and how literature works in order to write sad, flat essays about why Britain should not have Brexited, it would be an enormous loss. Nowhere is that truth more evident than in Feel Free ’s celebration of the freedom to care about things that are not politics — art, philosophy, aesthetics — and its simultaneous argument in favor of that freedom.

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