Culture

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays BY Zadie Smith. Penguin Press HC, The. Hardcover, 320 pages. $26.
Cover of Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Possessed of both imaginative empathy and an astringent wit, rigorously nonjudgmental yet armed with a state-of-the-art bullshit detector, Zadie Smith’s nonfiction glimmers with the same cultural and emotional acuity that illuminated her novels White Teeth and On Beauty. In Changing My Mind, a collection of criticism, essays, and reviews for outlets such as The New Yorker and the U.K. Guardian, her instincts are expansive, inclusive, democratic, yet fiercely personal.