Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith
Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith
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Changing My Mind
Occasional Essays

Author: Zadie Smith

Narrator: Barbara Rosenblat

Unabridged: 12 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 11/12/2009

Synopsis

"[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.

About The Author

Zadie Smith was born in northwest London in 1975 and still lives in the area. She is the author of White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, Changing My Mind, and NW.Barbara Rosenblat, an eight-time Audie and 40-time Golden Earphone award winner, is one of the most-respected and sought-after voice actors in the audiobook industry. AudioFile magazine has named her a “Voice of the Twentieth Century,” stating “Barbara is to audiobooks what Meryl Streep is to film.” To learn more, visit barbararosenblat.com.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet

I've sometimes thought it would be great fun to chat with Zadie Smith about books and films. I'm not sure I any longer feel that. In these essays Zadie Smith proves how erudite she is but my feeling often was that this was her principle insecure aim. To show us how erudite she is. The first few essa......more

Goodreads review by Greg

I'm going pop off this quick little salvo and then move on to other things. Zadie Smith never calls the novel dead in this book. She also never tries to bury the lyrically realistic novel, one gets the feeling that she enjoys the more experimental side of literature but she seems more to want both s......more

Goodreads review by Buck

Since Mr. David Giltinan has already said everything I wanted to say about this book, plus a lot of other stuff I didn’t want to say but can certainly live with, please turn to his review now: [URL not allowed] For my money—and that’s Canadian money, so beware: it’ll fuck up yo......more

Quotes

“Smith writes with a beguiling mix of assurance and solemnity, borrowing her vocabulary from many intellectual and cultural sources… Smith’s native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can’t help hoping she’ll change her mind yet again.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Smith brings her novelist’s gifts— an eye for detail, a languid turn of phrase— to the essay form.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Taken together, [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… Smith shows herself in more ways than one to be a very old, empathetic head on ridiculously young shoulders… It’s in her impassioned, compulsively dialectical and endearingly wonkish inquiry into literature that Smith really takes off.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“It doesn’t seem to matter what she’s writing about—Kafka, her father, Liberia, George Clooney. Just placing anything within the magnetic field of her restlessly intelligent brain is enough to make it fascinating. Smith (White Teeth) has the gift…of showing you how she reads and thinks; watching her do it makes you feel smarter and more observant just by osmosis.”—Time
 
“Warmly insightful pieces that tease apart knotty strands of human experience… She has an uncanny eye for detail, on the streets of Liberia or at an Oscar gala in Los Angeles.” —O Magazine
 

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