Jezebel: Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, And Uncontrollable Vaginal Bleeding

Anna North — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 17:17:00 EDT

At their New Yorker Festival reading Friday, writers Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon demonstrated that writing across gender and class is not as hard as it seems. More »

Zadie Smith Takes Over Harper's Books Column, And We Are Happy

Margaret Hartmann — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:03:00 EDT

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Zadie Smith will write Harper's New Books column starting with the March 2011 issue, replacing Benjamin Moser. Smith says her mission is, "not simply to describe an end product but to delineate a process, an intimate experience with a book." More »

On Beauty

Anna Holmes — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:10:00 EDT

[Hay-On-We, U.K.; June 6. Image via Getty]

Changing My Mind: On Fiction, Race, And How 50 Cent Is Like Samuel Beckett

Anna North — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:20:00 EST

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Zadie Smith established herself as a literary wunderkind when she published White Teeth at the age of 25. Her collection of essays on topics ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to 50 Cent shows she's grown into something more. More »

Who's Your Girl Crush?

Anna North — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Today in The Daily Beast, writer Doree Shafrir examines the phenomenon of the "fantasy girl crush," the woman who's slightly cooler or more successful than you, and who you kind of want to be. More »

High Art

Anna North — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:20:00 EST

If you didn't get enough Zadie Smith earlier, check out this funny, strange audio interview. More »

New Yorker: Zadie Smith Writes About Comedy & Class Issues

Jessica G. — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:00:00 EST

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Wunderkind novelist Zadie Smith has a personal essay in this week's New Yorker that's ostensibly about British comedy of the Basil Fawlty "laugh-or-you'll-cry-genre," but is actually about her father and about class. More »

75 Books Every Woman Should Read

Jessica G. — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:40:00 EDT

Esquire put up a slideshow of 75 books every man should read, and it is indeed a very good list. However, it's a very good list that's also extremely myopic. It relies way too heavily on the old white dude cannon (particularly the WASP angst end of it) with books by Updike, Cheever, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Hemingway, McPhee, Joyce, Roth, Mailer, and the token Russians. There are only four non-white men on the list (Ellison, Rushdie, Haley, Wright) and just one woman, the incomparable Flannery O'Connor with her classic book of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. The only really offensive choice on the list is Bukowski. I've read Bukowski, and even though he's an old cuss, I like his writing. However, I would never call something so unapologetically misogynistic something men "should" read. Anyway, in light of Esquire's myopia, we decided to curate a list of 20 books every woman should read. You should fill in the other 55 in the comments! More »

Is A Female-Only Literature Prize Sexist?

Jessica G. — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Upon the release of this year's long-list for the Orange Broadband prize for women's fiction, a couple of English novelists are decrying the prize under the grounds that it's conceptually sexist (Zadie Smith, pictured, won the Orange in 2006 for On Beauty). Still Life scribe A.S. Byatt bitched about the prize to the Times of London, saying, "Such a prize was never needed" because it ghettoizes women's literature. Byatt is so against the prize on principle that she refuses to allow her books to be considered for the Orange at all. Novelist Tim Lott adds to Byatt's gripes in The Telegraph, saying the Orange is unnecessary because, "Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers. Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers." More »