Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays »

The debut wunderkind of the new millennium was 24-year-old Zadie Smith, who finished her manuscript for White Teeth as a college student in Cambridge, England, only to find herself sitting on a six-figure advance, an international bestseller and onslaught of literary praise comparing her to the likes of Charles Dickens and Salman Rushdie.

"[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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

As the decade winds down and best-ofs are published, one of the least controversial names on literary lists is Zadie Smith's. Her White Teeth (2000) was an instant landmark, a novel of multicultural London at once accomplished and authentically youthful, fresh. Its structure, its improbable ending, mattered less than its startling new voice. Smith, however, repaid the hype surrounding this debut with novels of more deliberate construction, for example paying homage to E. M. Forster in her third novel, On Beauty. But this attitude -- at once studious and brilliantly presumptive -- has seen the best results in her criticism. As a still-young writer, Smith isn't afraid to ask big questions. And as a famous novelist, she isn't afraid to answer them. It is even whispered in some corners that Zadie Smith may become not a great novelist but a great critic.