Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
A Penguin paperback of Zadie Smith's occasional essays, covering Forster, Hepburn, Obama, David Foster Wallace, and the minor humiliations of the writing life. The pieces are loose in the best way, moving from literary criticism to personal essay without announcing the transition. Smith is funny about her own contradictions and serious about the books that formed her. The Penguin cover is the simple typographic design the house uses for writers who no longer need an image to sell a book. The paper is the standard trade stock and the format is the comfortable size for carrying through several essays at once. Ideal reader: the reader who wants literary criticism that admits its own prejudices, or the writer who needs proof that changing one's mind is a legitimate critical method.
