by Zadie Smith
About the Author
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, two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free, and a short story collection, Grand Union. She is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
All the author’s royalties will go to charity.
This edition benefits:
The Equal Justice Initiative
The COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund for New York
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*That were, in any case, imperfectly enacted in her own country—though more rigorously implemented elsewhere in Europe.
*My current favorite is “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” by Toni Cade Bambara, written back in 1980, which has the advantage of having a no-bullshit title and very little bullshit in the body of the piece.
*There needn’t be anything fluffy or falsely positive about this concept of love through art: the most apparently nihilistic or antisentimental art has still committed itself to shaping time into something other than itself, and to the process of having that something witnessed or experienced by another person—the audience—and this, to paraphrase Kafka, is “of a faith value that can never be exhausted.” In the remarkable cases of Yukio Mishima and Édouard Levé, even the act of suicide—that most complete and final rejection of the idea of doing “something” available to us—was yet capable of being refashioned into a work of art.
*I assume the picture is a candid shot from the making of The Passion of the Christ.