Zadie Smith on Male Critics, Appropriation, and What Interests Her Novelistically About Trump

In an interview in 2000, Zadie Smith told the Guardian about the pressure she felt after the astonishing success of her debut novel, White Teeth. “I was expected to be some expert on multicultural affairs, as if multiculturalism is a genre of fiction or something,” she said. “Whereas it’s just a fact of life—like there are people of different races on the planet.” Whether it’s indeed a fact of life or, we now fear, a feature of American life that is at risk of erasure, multiculturalism in all its complexity is at the center of Smith’s books. From White Teeth to NW, which was published in 2012, Smith’s characters inhabit mixed urban communities, often in London. Her latest novel, Swing Time, is out this week; set in England and West Africa, the story concerns the friendship of two young girls who meet in a dance class (“our shade of brown was exactly the same”) and traces the paths of their lives over a quarter-century. Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2016-11-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #american life #white teeth #swing time #west africa #young girls

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[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2014-03-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-03-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-03-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-03-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Guardian | 2014-03-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-02-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Guardian | 2014-02-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-02-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Advertising Age | 2014-02-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Guardian | 2014-01-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-01-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-01-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2013-12-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Los Angeles Times | 2013-12-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ AllThingsD | 2013-12-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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