Listening to award-winning author Zadie Smith read her collection of six personal essays about life in the year 2020 is such a transcendent experience that when done, I started again from the beginning. That voice—London-born, smooth, warm, well modulated with a hint of gravel and exquisite articulation. The pace—quick but not too fast. Her “here’s the thing” attitude. Her lovely singing. Yes, singing. And the folks who pass though her essays—a homeless man, an island-born immigrant, a fellow macchiato drinker—Smith gives them individual voices with a skill worthy of a professional narrator. The witty, observant, thoughtful essays touch on the pandemic, womanhood, America, families, work, classism and racism, reading and writing, and what makes life worthwhile. This audiobook makes life worthwhile. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2020 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

★ 07/20/2020

In this incisive and insightful collection, Smith (Grand Union) ruminates on the pandemic, racial injustice, and the writer’s role in a time of social upheaval. The collection begins with “Peonies,” in which a memory of admiring flowers in a community garden sparks reflections on the female body. In “The American Experience,” Smith blasts Donald Trump’s pandemic response and considers how the crisis has undermined ideas of American exceptionalism. “Something to Do,” the most substantial piece, reflects on doing creative work during quarantine and how her own life of “executing self-conceived schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat” was upended by having family at home. In “Screengrabs,” she briefly profiles familiar faces around her neighborhood, including a man Smith fans will recognize from a story in her Grand Union collection and a woman who is the “ideal city dweller” and cultivates “community without overly sentimentalizing the concept.” In a postscript to this essay, Smith skillfully demonstrates how the pandemic and police brutality constitute two sides of the same coin for Black Americans. Smith is at her perceptive and precise best in this slim but thematically weighty volume of personal and civil reckoning. (July)

Lean and powerful—the collection is less than 100 pages—like pencil sketches that capture a scene or a figure in a few brief masterly strokes. When we do look back on this period, these are among the essays we will turn to . . . These essays explore, wonder, argue and prod. The pleasure of reading them lies not in receiving experience in a finished mold, but in joining Ms. Smith as she takes our shared bewilderment and begins to pour.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

“While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential’—as well as on banana bread, pedicures, and tulips.” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020
 
“There are six essays in [Smith’s] new collection, which capture the pandemic moment we’ve been living in with a clarity that only Zadie Smith could unearth in the middle of a pandemic. Even when she’s pushing you to see your own complicity, it’s comforting to have her voice helping you make sense of the world.” —GOOP

“Zadie Smith has always been at least as phenomenal an essayist as she is a novelist. This slim, flash-published volume of reflections on life under quarantine rides the waves of dread, loneliness, community, loss and self-refection we all went through—and still are.” —Los Angeles Times 

“Smith’s slim volume is a balm during an anxious year. We have learned the meaning of essential, and Smith’s prose is correspondingly stripped down. Clear. Precise. Orderly . . . An indispensable snapshot of a time when we were all scrambling to put our thoughts in order. I for one, am thankful to Smith for offering us hers.” —Tracey Baptiste, Washington Post
 
“A slender and moving compendium . . . [W]hat unites these quietly cerebral vignettes is a pervasive interest in and empathy for the lives of others.” —Matthew Adams, Seattle Times

“One of our finest living writers has already produced what may be the first definitive chronicle of an era she dubs ‘the global humbling.’ In a series of essays both personal and political, Zadie Smith turns her sharp gaze to everything from a bouquet of peonies to the death of George Floyd, with disarming insight into her own shifting perspectives as woman, writer, mother, and citizen of the world. ‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art,’ she suggests at one point, too modestly; we may not have asked for Intimations, but this slim, resonant collection still feels like a gift.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
 
“Intimations is the third and slimmest of [Smith’s] essay collections, at 100 pages, but its psychic heft is substantial. In six essays that feel as intimate as a long walk with an old friend, Smith takes on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including police brutality and economic injustice. The book is grounded in inquiry far more often than in certainty, however, and the collection is one that probes, exploring everything from the relationship between privilege and suffering to the nature of isolation and what it means to be confined with the people we love.” —Ericka Taylor, NPR.org
 
“[Smith] is a spectacular essayist . . . who has written searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family. Such issues continue to infuse the present, although their salience is complicated by the ways the virus has eroded collective trust . . . This is the essential job of the essayist: to explore not our innocence but our complicity. I want to say this works because Smith doesn’t take herself too seriously, but that’s not accurate. More to the point, she is willing to expose the tangle of feelings the pandemic has provoked. And this may seem a small thing, but it’s essential: I never doubt her voice on the page.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
 
“Intimations feels less like a precise attempt to document the COVID-19 era than a more abstract meditation on time: who is given it, who has it taken from them, and what its sudden presence or absence can lead to. 'Time is how you spend your love,' Smith wrote in her 2005 novel On Beauty—quoting a poem by her own husband, Nick Laird—and Intimations functions impressively as a document of the mixed blessing of time as well as a searing excoriation of a society that has always apportioned it unevenly.” —Emma Specter, Vogue.com
 
“These days, I find in [Smith’s] work what I once found in Paley and Baldwin—a clarifying lucidity wedded to big-hearted moral awareness. These virtues shine through her powerful new collection, Intimations: Six Essays, which she began at the onset of the pandemic and finished shortly after Floyd's killing. Although only 100 pages, it made me think more than most books five times that length. There's something worth quoting on virtually every page . . . Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air
 
“Intimations, [Smith’s] slender new collection (less than 100 pages) of ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness. This cast of mind doesn’t mean that Smith avoids moral stances. In Intimations, she speaks clearly and forcefully about the murder of George Floyd and the legacy of slavery and the systemic sins revealed by Covid-19 . . . But despite these jabs, Smith remains unmistakably noncombative. This spirit appears born not of a fear of confrontation but a genuine perplexity (of a searching, brilliant kind) at the nature of experience and people, including herself. . . . Smith’s gifts as a novelist animate her essays . . . In Zadie Smith’s universe—meaning, for my money, the one we’re all living in—complexity is king.” —John Williams, The New York Times
 
“Slender, solacing . . . To read Zadie Smith is to recognize how few writers seem to genuinely love human beings the way she does, with such infinite curiosity and attention, even when they are behaving monstrously. Or, for that matter, how few are able to do justice to what, for want of a better term, we’ll call common decency.” —Laura Miller, Slate 

“What a treat, then, that Zadie Smith has presented us with this jewel of a book, six essays all written at the beginning of lockdown, each generous, reliably insightful explorations of things like suffering, productivity, and love; all reminders of the kind of art people are capable of, even in the most dire of times.” —Refinery29
 
“Incisive and insightful . . . Smith is at her perceptive and precise best in this slim but thematically weighty volume of personal and civil reckoning.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There will be innumerable books to come about life in the pandemic, but Zadie Smith is who we want to read right now . . . This will be essential reading for us now, and when we look back in the years to come.” —Town & Country, Best Books to Read This July

“[Smith] writes with the immediacy of a house on fire, illuminating the tumult we are collectively experiencing . . . A sharply honed, obsidian collection glowing with Smith’s insights and eloquence.” —Booklist

“An incisive collection . . . In just under 100 pages, Smith intimately captures the profundity of our current historical moment. Quietly powerful, deftly crafted essays bear witness to the contagion of suffering.” —Kirkus (starred review)

08/14/2020

The six personal essays that comprise this compelling brief volume gives us novelist Smith's (Swing Time) impressions and thoughts during the pandemic lockdown following the killing of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. A major voice of contemporary literature, Smith gently and thoughtfully takes on a broad range of issues that are personal to her but speak universally to many of us. Her essay on "The America Exception" is a challenge to President Trump's misplaced nostalgia. The series of vignettes that make up "Screengrabs" uses Smith's sharp writing skills to create several disparate portraits—one of a man who runs a nail salon in New York, another of the IT student whose "style" is a trait of youth, and still another of a "heavy smoking" neighbor, among others. The most compelling observations in "Postscript: Contempt As a Virus" bring us back to the acute uneasiness of the present moment as reflected in behaviors by British prime minister Boris Johnson's senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, who violated shelter-in-place orders in Great Britain, and also the brutality of Floyd's murder. VERDICT Smith demonstrates once again that she is a powerful albeit quiet voice for our challenging times. Highly Recommended.—Herbert E. Shapiro, Boca Raton, FL

Listening to award-winning author Zadie Smith read her collection of six personal essays about life in the year 2020 is such a transcendent experience that when done, I started again from the beginning. That voice—London-born, smooth, warm, well modulated with a hint of gravel and exquisite articulation. The pace—quick but not too fast. Her “here’s the thing” attitude. Her lovely singing. Yes, singing. And the folks who pass though her essays—a homeless man, an island-born immigrant, a fellow macchiato drinker—Smith gives them individual voices with a skill worthy of a professional narrator. The witty, observant, thoughtful essays touch on the pandemic, womanhood, America, families, work, classism and racism, reading and writing, and what makes life worthwhile. This audiobook makes life worthwhile. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2020 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

★ 2020-06-23
Rueful, angry, deftly-crafted and potent responses to ominous times.

With 2020 barely “halfway done,” fiction writer and essayist Smith offers an incisive collection of short pieces reflecting, she writes, “some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me.” Those events, not surprisingly, center around the pandemic but also include the killing of George Floyd and the worldwide response to racial injustice that the murder incited. Sheltered with her family, Smith reflects on the meaning of creativity, particularly writing, which seems at once a way to gain control (“when I am writing, space and time itself bend to my will!”) and a way to fill time. “There is no great difference between novels and banana bread,” she writes. “They are both just something to do.” Yet these essays clearly have emerged from profound “moral anxiety” about privilege, hatred, and oppression: of “contempt as a virus.” The pandemic, she notes, has underscored pervasive inequality and injustice. “Untimely death has rarely been random in these United States,” she writes. “It has usually had a precise physiognomy, location, and bottom line.” At the heart of those distinctions is racism, laid bare by Floyd’s murder: “It was the virus, in its most lethal manifestation.” She once thought, she writes, “that there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects, revealed how widespread it really is, how the symptoms arise, how irresponsibly and shamefully too many Americans keep giving it to each other, generation after generation, causing intolerable and unending damage both to individual bodies and to the body politic—I thought, if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined, we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that any more.” In just under 100 pages, Smith intimately captures the profundity of our current historical moment.

Quietly powerful, deftly crafted essays bear witness to the contagion of suffering.