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“... Zadie Smith’s career has been a 15-year psychodrama. An advance of hundreds of thousands of pounds on a few dozen manuscript pages when she was still at Cambridge made her a celebrity before she was 25. I read White Teeth while working on the copy desk at Us Weekly; I remember having to check her birthday for a profile and thinking I’d already wasted my life ...”

“... adopter.* The book gathered a buzz, went to America, won a prize from the Believer, then in 2008 Zadie Smith wrote about it in the New York Review of Books, in tandem with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Smith immediately got the point of the McCarthy project, its vehemence, its attack on the plushy poshlust of what ...”

“... enough. There is a remarkable story here by Giuseppe Pontiggia, coolly and crisply translated by Zadie Smith, about an Italian boy who falls in love with practicality and his own sense of the way things really are: he can’t stand his father’s insistence on poetry and culture. He grows up, lives and dies according to his own plan, a model of willed ...”

“... of touch. She shows her range not by depicting people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, as Zadie Smith does, but by exploring the complexity of the black experience. There are several non-black characters in the collection, and one of the stories is set in Japan, but the non-blacks are always described from the outside, and they are interesting ...”

“... among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in college, I’d admired Derrida and the Marxist and ...”

“... power is that we keep likening his writing to a drug. ‘I need the next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary ...”

“... anthology The New Poetry, which promoted Hughes and Plath over the stodgy Movement), Edward Lucie-Smith and, terrifyingly, Michael Horovitz, the editor of ‘one of the decade’s genuinely polemical anthologies: Children of Albion (1969)’. Stevenson’s fondness for Prynne over Larkin is less offensive than his reasons for dismissing Larkin, which betray a ...”

“... farcical escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David Foster Wallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant cheese, a baby who plays air guitar in his crib, and so on. These ...”

“... acute, this would never be a straightforward process. In her essay on Wallace in Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith noticed his tendency to ‘romanticise the pure relations’ the wistful intellectual likes to imagine to exist ‘between simple people’ (she is discussing characters from Wallace’s short story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous ...”

“... often fall below the threshold of consciousness’ but play a key role in our responses to art. Zadie Smith’s essay ‘Some Notes on Attunement’ offers her the opportunity to set up some key questions about ‘omnivore taste’ and aesthetic education, as well as to set out her worries about the schism between popular and academic ways of talking ...”

“... said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The tragedy is that you are all of previous good character,’ the judge said, as he sentenced them to six months each. Chelsea Ives, the 18-year-old ‘shamed ...”

“... feel differently about David Lynch’s darkness if actual ears kept turning up in his backyard. Zadie Smith wrote an indispensable, somewhat tortured essay about this collection, begun when he was alive and published after his death. It’s an example of the generosity, the lavishness of mind, the almost rabbinical close reading he inspired at his ...”

“... than I can. It’s not my sort of book at all, but it leaves me wanting to read his other books. Zadie Smith thinks it a masterpiece and says so on the cover. Certainly it’s a new way of writing a novel.25 May, Yorkshire. To Leeds this morning in an empty train with neither of us feeling very clever but revived by a lovely lunch at Sous le Nez in ...”

“... No Good’, makes both told and trouble seem to end with a w; ‘this voice,’ the characters in Zadie Smith’s NW decide, ‘sounded like London – especially its Northern and North-Western zones – as if its owner were patron saint of their neighbourhoods.’ Throughout Back to Black, her glottal-stopped London accent eerily combines with a Motown ...”

“... a straight line while others turned and stumbled’, and is very much the Millat character in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Karim is supposed to embody the dissonance and non-conformity of second-generation Bangladeshi youths. The focus of moral panic about Asian gangs, they should instead be listened to. Given half a chance, they will talk about ...”