Dead and Alive
Essays
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A TIME Best Book of 2025
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2025
"Smart, somber . . . There’s pleasure in watching a novelist wired to see all sides at once wrangle with her own dynamic subjectivity."
- The New York Times Book Review
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.
In the past two decades, few writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.
This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.
With an eye towards the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and critic Smith (Feel Free) brings an incisive eye and keen wit to art, music, fiction, politics, and more in this wide-ranging essay collection. Whether analyzing the misogyny faced by female muses; celebrating the work of a generational novelist, such as Toni Morrison; or pointedly commenting on the political and cultural tumult of the current moment, Smith delivers original insights couched in sly, artful prose. ("We thought our lives would be reasonably paced and tell a story full of meaning. Instead it's just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions, except the certainty of death.") Smith offers moments of small delight—like the time she as a young writer unknowingly bummed a smoke off Joan Didion—and takes aim at groups threatening the planet, like think tanks and lobbyists who deny climate change. Standout essays abound, but "Some Notes on Mediated Time" shines as an era-defining summation of how technology impedes the ability to be present. Readers will be rewarded by this unforgettable collection.
