She engages artists on their own terms she's opinionated, but not judgmental. Reading Feel Free is a lot like hanging out with a friend who's just as at home in a museum as she is binge-watching a sitcom. In an essay about Joni Mitchell, she describes beautifully how she became a fan despite an unpleasant experience with the singer's music during a road trip ("I started stabbing at the dashboard, trying to find the button that makes things stop." And she engages with a variety of art forms with an admirable open-mindedness eight years after her previous collection, she's still willing to change her mind. It's no accident she chose to emphasize the word "reimagined." Smith believes that fiction - that any kind of art, really - still has the power to shape our worlds. Refreshingly, she does it all without the kind of knowing wink that some cultural observers can't resist if she believes there's a clear-cut dichotomy between so-called "high" and "low" culture, she doesn't let on.Īuthor Interviews Novelist Zadie Smith On Historical Nostalgia And The Nature Of Talent Ballard and Jay-Z, Billie Holiday and Justin Bieber. She considers Brexit and Key & Peele, J.G. Like her previous collection, Changing My Mind, Smith's latest book is impressively wide-ranging. So let's let her off the hook, and just say this: Her new book is lively, intelligent and frequently hilarious, and proves that she's one of the brightest minds in English literature today. Zadie Smith, the novelist and author of the brilliant new essay collection Feel Free, would seem to qualify, except for one important thing: She is English, and thus prone to the kind of almost fatal embarrassment that all Britons feel when they're even vaguely complimented. To be one, you have to be smart about more than one thing, you have to be able to translate academic jargon into something approaching English, and most importantly, you can never define yourself as one. Of all the vague terms that journalists love to apply to mostly unwilling celebrities, one of the slipperiest is "public intellectual." It's hard to define, but with apologies to Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Feel Free Subtitle Essays Author Zadie Smith
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