Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
by Zadie Smith

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
List Price: $26.95
Our Price: $2.77
You Save: $24.18 (90%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions


(Click here)
Buy this book at online book store in your country
Canada | UK | Germany | France

Book Summary Information

Author: Zadie Smith
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-11-12
ISBN: 1594202370
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The

Summary of Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith?s nonfiction over the past decade.

Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.

Split into four sections??Reading,? ?Being,? ?Seeing,? and ?Feeling??Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith?s unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays?some published here for the first time?on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.

In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers?E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others?have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences?in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond?that have nourished Smith?s rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.

Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.


Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2009: One of Zadie Smith's great gifts as a novelist is her openness: both to character and ideas in her stories, and to what a novel itself should be. That she's a novelist was clear as soon she broke through with White Teeth in her early twenties, but what kind she'll be (or will be next) seems open to change. Which all, along with her consistent intelligence, grace, and wit, makes her an ideal essayist too, especially for the sort of "occasional essays" collected for the first time in Changing My Mind. She can make the case equally for the cozy "middle way" of E.M. Forster and the most purposefully demanding of David Foster Wallace's stories, both as a reader and, you imagine, as a writer who is considering their methods for her own. The occasions in this book didn't only bring her to write about writers, though: she also investigates, among other subjects, Katherine Hepburn, Liberia, and Barack Obama (through the lens of Pygmalion), and, in the collection's finest piece, recalls her late father and their shared comedy snobbery. One wishes more occasions upon her. --Tom Nissley

Essays Books

Book Subjects
Most talked about in Essays Books
Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings ImageShaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings
by Angela Carter
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1998-12-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $20.66
Price in other shops: $39.00
Minerva Louise (Picture Lions) ImageMinerva Louise (Picture Lions)
by Janet Morgan Stoeke
Picture Lions; Published: 1989-09-21; Paperback; Book
White Dynamite and Curly Kidd ImageWhite Dynamite and Curly Kidd
by Bill Martin, John Archambault
Collins; Published: 1988-08; Hardcover; Book
max's christmas Imagemax's christmas
by rosemary wells
Dial; Published: 1986; Hardcover; Book
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book ImageLost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
by Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 1983-06-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $66.99
Shadow Lines: Educational Edition, with Critical Essays by A N Kaul, Suvir Kaul, Meenakshi Mukherjee & Rajesewari Sunder rajan ImageShadow Lines: Educational Edition, with Critical Essays by A N Kaul, Suvir Kaul, Meenakshi Mukherjee & Rajesewari Sunder rajan
by Amitav Ghosh
South Asia Books/Oxford Univ Press, India; Published: 1998-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $29.24
The Book of Other People ImageThe Book of Other People
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2008-01-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.91
Price in other shops: $15.00
Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin American Library) ImageWalden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin American Library)
by Henry David Thoreau
Penguin Classics; Published: 1983-08-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.62
Price in other shops: $12.00
The Portable Machiavelli ImageThe Portable Machiavelli
by Niccolo Machiavelli
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1979-01-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.35
Price in other shops: $20.00
Essays of E.B. White ImageEssays of E.B. White
by E. B. White
Joanna Cotler Books; Published: 1978-10-19; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $298.37
Similar Books and other products
The Language of Blood ImageThe Language of Blood
by Jane Jeong Trenka
Graywolf Press; Published: 2005-07-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.91
Price in other shops: $15.00
Girl With Curious Hair ImageGirl With Curious Hair
by David Foster Wallace
W. W. Norton & Company; Published: 1996-02-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.71
Price in other shops: $14.95
Maps to Anywhere (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction) ImageMaps to Anywhere (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction)
by Bernard Cooper
University of Georgia Press; Published: 1997-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $20.03
Price in other shops: $22.95
The Marriage Plot: A Novel ImageThe Marriage Plot: A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2011-10-11; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.24
Price in other shops: $28.00
Modern American Memoirs ImageModern American Memoirs
Harper Perennial; Published: 1996-08-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.16
Price in other shops: $16.99
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments ImageA Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
by David Foster Wallace
Back Bay Books; Published: 1998-02-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.51
Price in other shops: $14.99
Pulphead: Essays ImagePulphead: Essays
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
FSG Originals; Published: 2011-10-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.81
Price in other shops: $16.00
The Book of Other People ImageThe Book of Other People
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2008-01-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.91
Price in other shops: $15.00
White Teeth: A Novel ImageWhite Teeth: A Novel
by Zadie Smith
Vintage; Published: 2001-06-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.95
Price in other shops: $15.95
On Beauty ImageOn Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Penguin Books; Published: 2006-08-29; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.98
Price in other shops: $15.00
Book store. Illustrated catalog of books on different categories