Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? What is Italian feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the author, can Nabokov revive him? Is Date Movie the worst film ever made? Split into five sections -"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering"- Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing of Obama, Katharine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner's care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful.