Library 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…
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zadie smith
66 posts
Molly 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…
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 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,…
Can’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…
Eliza 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…