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 two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. 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.
“Lean and powerful—the collection is less than 100 pages—like
pencil sketches that capture a scene or a figure in a few brief
masterly strokes. When we do look back on this period, these are
among the essays we will turn to . . . These essays explore,
wonder, argue and prod. The pleasure of reading them lies not in
receiving experience in a finished mold, but in joining Ms. Smith
as she takes our shared bewilderment and begins to pour.” —Wall
Street Journal
“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment
with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political
intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social
systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020
“While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six
dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary
culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once
necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential’—as well as on banana
bread, pedicures, and tulips.” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best
Books of 2020
“There are six essays in [Smith’s] new collection, which capture
the pandemic moment we’ve been living in with a clarity that only
Zadie Smith could unearth in the middle of a pandemic. Even when
she’s pushing you to see your own complicity, it’s comforting to
have her voice helping you make sense of the world.” —GOOP
“Zadie Smith has always been at least as phenomenal an essayist as
she is a novelist. This slim, flash-published volume of reflections
on life under quarantine rides the waves of dread, loneliness,
community, loss and self-refection we all went through—and still
are.” —Los Angeles Times
“Smith’s slim volume is a balm during an anxious year. We have
learned the meaning of essential, and Smith’s prose is
correspondingly stripped down. Clear. Precise. Orderly . . . An
indispensable snapshot of a time when we were all scrambling to put
our thoughts in order. I for one, am thankful to Smith for offering
us hers.” —Tracey Baptiste, Washington Post
“A slender and moving compendium . . . [W]hat unites these quietly
cerebral vignettes is a pervasive interest in and empathy for the
lives of others.” —Matthew Adams, Seattle Times
“One of our finest living writers has already produced what may be
the first definitive chronicle of an era she dubs ‘the global
humbling.’ In a series of essays both personal and political, Zadie
Smith turns her sharp gaze to everything from a bouquet of peonies
to the death of George Floyd, with disarming insight into her own
shifting perspectives as woman, writer, mother, and citizen of the
world. ‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never
demand art,’ she suggests at one point, too modestly; we may not
have asked for Intimations, but this slim, resonant collection
still feels like a gift.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment
Weekly
“Intimations is the third and slimmest of [Smith’s] essay
collections, at 100 pages, but its psychic heft is substantial. In
six essays that feel as intimate as a long walk with an old friend,
Smith takes on some of the most pressing issues of our time,
including police brutality and economic injustice. The book is
grounded in inquiry far more often than in certainty, however, and
the collection is one that probes, exploring everything from the
relationship between privilege and suffering to the nature of
isolation and what it means to be confined with the people we
love.” —Ericka Taylor, NPR.org
“[Smith] is a spectacular essayist . . . who has written
searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family.
Such issues continue to infuse the present, although their salience
is complicated by the ways the virus has eroded collective trust .
. . This is the essential job of the essayist: to explore not our
innocence but our complicity. I want to say this works because
Smith doesn’t take herself too seriously, but that’s not accurate.
More to the point, she is willing to expose the tangle of feelings
the pandemic has provoked. And this may seem a small thing, but
it’s essential: I never doubt her voice on the page.” —David Ulin,
Los Angeles Times
“Intimations feels less like a precise attempt to document the
COVID-19 era than a more abstract meditation on time: who is given
it, who has it taken from them, and what its sudden presence or
absence can lead to. 'Time is how you spend your love,' Smith wrote
in her 2005 novel On Beauty—quoting a poem by her own husband, Nick
Laird—and Intimations functions impressively as a
document of the mixed blessing of time as well as a searing
excoriation of a society that has always apportioned it unevenly.”
—Emma Specter, Vogue.com
“These days, I find in [Smith’s] work what I once found in Paley
and Baldwin—a clarifying lucidity wedded to big-hearted moral
awareness. These virtues shine through her powerful new collection,
Intimations: Six Essays, which she began at the onset of the
pandemic and finished shortly after Floyd's killing. Although
only 100 pages, it made me think more than most books five times
that length. There's something worth quoting on virtually every
page . . . Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through
right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a
fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or
sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation
for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at
being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air
“Intimations, [Smith’s] slender new collection (less than 100
pages) of ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few
momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness. This
cast of mind doesn’t mean that Smith avoids moral stances. In
Intimations, she speaks clearly and forcefully about the murder of
George Floyd and the legacy of slavery and the systemic sins
revealed by Covid-19 . . . But despite these jabs, Smith remains
unmistakably noncombative. This spirit appears born not of a fear
of confrontation but a genuine perplexity (of a searching,
brilliant kind) at the nature of experience and people, including
herself. . . . Smith’s gifts as a novelist animate her essays . . .
In Zadie Smith’s universe—meaning, for my money, the one we’re all
living in—complexity is king.” —John Williams, The New York
Times
“Slender, solacing . . . To read Zadie Smith is to recognize how
few writers seem to genuinely love human beings the way she does,
with such infinite curiosity and attention, even when they are
behaving monstrously. Or, for that matter, how few are able to do
justice to what, for want of a better term, we’ll call common
decency.” —Laura Miller, Slate
“What a treat, then, that Zadie Smith has presented us with this
jewel of a book, six essays all written at the beginning of
lockdown, each generous, reliably insightful explorations of things
like suffering, productivity, and love; all reminders of the kind
of art people are capable of, even in the most dire of times.”
—Refinery29
“Incisive and insightful . . . Smith is at her perceptive and
precise best in this slim but thematically weighty volume of
personal and civil reckoning.” —Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
“There will be innumerable books to come about life in the
pandemic, but Zadie Smith is who we want to read right now . .
. This will be essential reading for us now, and when we look back
in the years to come.” —Town & Country, Best Books to Read This
July
“[Smith] writes with the immediacy of a house on fire, illuminating
the tumult we are collectively experiencing . . . A sharply
honed, obsidian collection glowing with Smith’s insights and
eloquence.” —Booklist
“An incisive collection . . . In just under 100 pages, Smith
intimately captures the profundity of our current historical
moment. Quietly powerful, deftly crafted essays bear witness to the
contagion of suffering.” —Kirkus (starred review)
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