“It’s a broad church that way”
In one brief quote, the contradictions and joys of literature as a mirror.
Andrew Sullivan cites our interview with the eloquent Zadie Smith.
...morePosts Tagged: zadie smith
The Rumpus Interview with Zadie Smith
For our first interview of 2013, we sit down with the incomparable Zadie Smith for a thoughtful chat about identity, the pleasure of reading, and how to write honestly about the state of humanity.
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I Like My Oatmeal Lumpy, or How I Came To Rap The Humpty Dance in front of New York’s Literary Elite
On an unseasonably warm day in October, I was invited to participate in The Happy Ending Reading and Music Series
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NW by Zadie Smith
The fat sun stalls by the phone masts.
This is how Zadie Smith opens her latest novel, NW, and how appropriate–that something so fiery and core-hot, so screaming and universal could appear dumbfounded, loafing, stagnant.
Meet North West London, a relative dystopia from those adolescent promises that London made Smith’s crew of characters.
...moreFURTHER GLIMPSES INTO ZADIE SMITH’S NEW NOVEL
“Pencil leaves no mark on magazine pages. Somewhere she has read that the gloss gives you cancer. Everyone knows it shouldn’t be this hot. Shrivelled blossom and bitter little apples. Birds singing the wrong tunes in the wrong trees too early in the year.
...moreA PEEK INSIDE ZADIE SMITH’S NEW NOVEL
The Millions has excerpted the first lines of Zadie Smith’s forthcoming novel NW.
Set in northwest London, this book is Smith’s first novel since the publication of On Beauty in 2005. NW will be released this September.
...moreLibrary Lamentations
“A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.”
How do we value libraries? Novelist Zadie Smith writes an essay about the imminent closure of her local library, articulating the roles libraries serve beyond their utilitarian functions, and the political implications of their dismissal.
...moreMolly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
I was ten years old when 1999 became 2000. My knowledge of the Y2K problem was vague; I could only glean a nebulous mood of panic from overheard newscasts and conversations between adults. My own parents did not seem worried. We went to New Year’s Eve festivities at a family friend’s house.
Zadie Smith on Minding the Gap
Zadie Smith discusses the gap between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world, as well as the need to bridge “the language of development and the language of the rest of us.” The recognition of that disparity led to the creation of Writers Bloc, which seeks to insert novelists into the conversation around universal education.
...moreThe British 20 Under 40
Great Britain is making its own lists. And Great Britain is still publishing novels.
If you believe the rumors, the raging historical narratives are printed by hand, folded into folios, carried from London’s dust into the countryside in the talons of birds that never made it across the Atlantic, placed on a round table in the middle of Sherwood Forest, then torn open by the teeth of hunting dogs.
...moreCan’t Tell Me Nothing
The Rumpus doesn’t really do Kanye West. It doesn’t hate him and it doesn’t love him. It just doesn’t go there. But when the self-proclaimed “voice of this generation“— in an interview for the release of his book, no less — says, “I am a proud non-reader of books.
...moreEliza Doolittle in the White House
In her essay “Speaking in Tongues” in The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, Zadie Smith examines Barack Obama’s doubleness, not just his biracial genetic history but how he inhabits multiple voices. She reviews his first book Dreams From My Father and sees him as an artist as much as a politician, but Smith warns: “For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians.
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