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Dead and Alive
An illuminating new essay collection from one of the most distinctive, exciting and acclaimed writers of her generation, Zadie Smith.
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic – and the meaning of ‘the commons’ in all our lives.
Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic – and the meaning of ‘the commons’ in all our lives.
Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published October 28, 2025
535 people are currently reading
5744 people want to read
About the author
Zadie Smith
114 books16.2k followersZadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 140 reviews
May 30, 2025
I have also tried to leave these essays as wide open as possible... the house of an essay may sometimes be strangely shaped or have a complicated floor plan - but the door is open [...] Reader, I do not know your name - but you are welcome.
But I've learned to think of doubt as an asset. There are some uses to never being satisfied or extremely confident in yourself. You keep trying.
The ending to Smith's introduction quoted above about open doors seems deliberately pointed without being aggressive: these essays are, indeed, welcoming, not didactic, questioning without lacking point and opinion - but in a world that is increasingly hostile to 'others', to alternative views and opinions, it also feels like Smith is laying out her open-armed politics as well as introducing a hospitable book.
Collecting together essays, speeches, articles, and obituaries to writers (Toni Morrison, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Hilary Mantel, Joan Didion), this is an incisive way in to the mind and world of Smith. The pieces seem to go back to 2019, include some pandemic pieces, and the latest is the hopeful essay written on 4 July 2024 - the date of the UK general election. The subject matter is wonderfully eclectic from essays on visual art, women artists as muses, a defence of urban living, musings on history and the writing of The Fraud to political essays: the climate crisis, Gaza, Tufton Street, capitalism, and the vision of what the current Labour government seems to have forgotten it once stood for.
Through it all is a strong and individual voice and a clear sense of a mind that is still curious and fascinated by our world. Unashamedly left-wing, socialist and multicultural, what strikes me most is the lack of anger here and a narrative of community, vision, ethics and open-hearted humanity. I was a little disappointed in Smith's previous collection Feel Free: Essays which felt a bit constricted and unfinished to me - this one is exactly what I wanted from Smith.
Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley
October 12, 2025
As usual I find, with essays, that I really enjoy some and others just don't resonate. I think it would be strange if I was fascinated by everything another human being was fascinated by.
Self Portrait by Celia Paul was a truly intriguing essay about the painter (and muse of Lucien Freud). I knew of Paul but the information and first person narrative was very revealing. I also enjoyed Odutola's Visions of Power about the work of artist, Toyin Ojih Odutola. It's always interesting, to me, to look at the art mentioned as I read. On Tàr, a review of the Cate Blanchett film about a fictional conductor, made me want to watch the movie really badly (and will once I've fewer books to read).
Some started well - the one juxtaposing Michael Jackson and Stormzy - but I got lost. Some went right over my head and some I found baffling.
I did find some sentences quite strange - such as the statement (in the Martin Amis obituary) that when Smith was in her teenage years "all of England's writers were dead ... the only living writer ... was Martin Amis ... Everybody else alive lived in America". I put Smith's teenage years between 1988 and 1997. So clearly Amis' father, Kingsley, didn't count nor did Mantel, Bennett, Keane, McEwan, Barnes and even Rushdie (on and off). It may seem pedantic but it felt like an odd thing to say.
The other strange statement was when she wondered where people could go to lose themselves - an odd statement for a novelist.
Other than those, that obviously stuck in my head, I enjoyed around 60% of the essays particularly the piece on Kara Walker, Agelessness, Black England and Black Manhattan.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Penguin General UK for the advance review copy.
Self Portrait by Celia Paul was a truly intriguing essay about the painter (and muse of Lucien Freud). I knew of Paul but the information and first person narrative was very revealing. I also enjoyed Odutola's Visions of Power about the work of artist, Toyin Ojih Odutola. It's always interesting, to me, to look at the art mentioned as I read. On Tàr, a review of the Cate Blanchett film about a fictional conductor, made me want to watch the movie really badly (and will once I've fewer books to read).
Some started well - the one juxtaposing Michael Jackson and Stormzy - but I got lost. Some went right over my head and some I found baffling.
I did find some sentences quite strange - such as the statement (in the Martin Amis obituary) that when Smith was in her teenage years "all of England's writers were dead ... the only living writer ... was Martin Amis ... Everybody else alive lived in America". I put Smith's teenage years between 1988 and 1997. So clearly Amis' father, Kingsley, didn't count nor did Mantel, Bennett, Keane, McEwan, Barnes and even Rushdie (on and off). It may seem pedantic but it felt like an odd thing to say.
The other strange statement was when she wondered where people could go to lose themselves - an odd statement for a novelist.
Other than those, that obviously stuck in my head, I enjoyed around 60% of the essays particularly the piece on Kara Walker, Agelessness, Black England and Black Manhattan.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Penguin General UK for the advance review copy.
November 12, 2025
Zadie is the absolute greatest. I spent most of today reading this book - such a tremendous collection of essays.
November 12, 2025
I think it's very easy to not understand Zadie Smith. It would be true to call her left-wing, activist, anti-colonial, black British, educated progressive, but these labels are a crude measure of her intellectual profile. She is a writer, and as a writer, she is curious about the world and about others' mental lives, and she wants to think about people, not glibly render judgment on their politics. Read as a whole, these essays show a social commentator willing to throw herself into any polemical conflict—but not willing to crouch in a trench and stay put on one side. She is both vanguard and old-guard, a believer in liberal values but not prepared to jettison the literary canon or her cultural patrimony. She is still that precocious upstart who wrote White Teeth, but in many ways, she is also surprisingly revanchist.
There's a certain whiplash from one essay to the next. In one essay, she decries the misogyny of Lucian Freud, an artist whose career exploited and erased his female subjects and their own artistic ambitions; in another essay, she is celebrating her close friendship with Philip Roth and extolling his wide breadth of erudition. She clearly likes literary bad boys—she was friends with Martin Amis, as well. She has no allegiance to one generation or movement. In one essay, she writes in support of pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses and the civic value of their youthful stance against an adult status quo and indifference; in a review of the film Tár, she is lamenting the naive young student who condemns Bach as a misogynist and then storms out of the room. But Zadie Smith has little sympathy with this callow bluster: "I'm the one severely triggered by statements like 'Chaucer is misogynistic' or 'Virginia Woolf was a racist'. Not because I can't see that both statements are partially true but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: 'Is it interesting?'" But it's unclear, here and in any essay, which generation she really belongs to.
Zadie Smith, naturally, questions all shibboleths, platitudes, truisms, or what she calls, 'containers'. In perhaps her finest essay, "Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction", Zadie Smith argues that the value of fiction resides in its ability to show us a new consciousness of the world, to see and imagine and inhabit the minds of people totally different from ourselves. She takes issue at those who believe we can only write from experience, as if only a black woman could write of black, female experience, or only a gay man could write of the gay, male experience. Such a belief would only circumscribe the human experience to a set of unimaginative caricatures and boring monoliths (as if black women think one way and gay men act one way). Walt Whitman famously wrote "I contain multitudes"—and Zadie Smith agrees that this is the right statement of common humanity, but she also suggests that we all discard the idea of "containing" people. We should be more porous, more open to the possibility of what human life can be, and we should let fiction liberate us from the carceral silos of identity politics.
Her weakest, and perhaps most controversial, essay is, ironically, "Shibboleth". Commenting on the campus protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict, Zadie Smith reflects on how language is euphemized and weaponized by political shorthands and simple slogans. It's easy to say 'Hamas'. It's easy to say 'Zionist colonialist state'. It's easy to utter a slogan like 'There is no such thing as the Palestinian people'. But as Zadie Smith argues, these reduce a complex people and intractable history into simple formulas. I agree to some extent, especially when I see these words echoed online and unmoored from reality. They are, in her view, more tribal calls than real policy statements. But I think there is a little bit of Periclean grandstanding here. After she meekly celebrates campus protesters and then pooh-poohs the academic jargon and political terms of debate, she invokes the nameless and numberless dead and calls for a ceasefire. I have no truck with ceasefires—but there is a certain degree of linguistic hypocrisy here as she summons the dead and transforms them into a plea: ceasefire. Naturally, however, one would have to wonder about the terms and durability of a ceasefire, the compromise and fallout involved, the strategic loss and longterm sufferings—on both sides. It's easy to invoke the dead in an argument. They cannot speak to correct you.
"Put me wherever you want," she says in the same article, "misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naive novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward." It's a sardonic kind of self-labelling, cloaking herself in all the invectives you can imagine for a progressive turncoat (except, obviously, the word turncoat), but that's the point. She never quite conforms to the creeds and language of progressive orthodoxy, and no label really fits. I wouldn't call her anything but a writer, one perhaps most like her literary heroes—James Baldwin and Joan Didion, two authors who are incredibly hard to pin down, both refusing to belong to or follow a single movement.
There's a certain whiplash from one essay to the next. In one essay, she decries the misogyny of Lucian Freud, an artist whose career exploited and erased his female subjects and their own artistic ambitions; in another essay, she is celebrating her close friendship with Philip Roth and extolling his wide breadth of erudition. She clearly likes literary bad boys—she was friends with Martin Amis, as well. She has no allegiance to one generation or movement. In one essay, she writes in support of pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses and the civic value of their youthful stance against an adult status quo and indifference; in a review of the film Tár, she is lamenting the naive young student who condemns Bach as a misogynist and then storms out of the room. But Zadie Smith has little sympathy with this callow bluster: "I'm the one severely triggered by statements like 'Chaucer is misogynistic' or 'Virginia Woolf was a racist'. Not because I can't see that both statements are partially true but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: 'Is it interesting?'" But it's unclear, here and in any essay, which generation she really belongs to.
Zadie Smith, naturally, questions all shibboleths, platitudes, truisms, or what she calls, 'containers'. In perhaps her finest essay, "Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction", Zadie Smith argues that the value of fiction resides in its ability to show us a new consciousness of the world, to see and imagine and inhabit the minds of people totally different from ourselves. She takes issue at those who believe we can only write from experience, as if only a black woman could write of black, female experience, or only a gay man could write of the gay, male experience. Such a belief would only circumscribe the human experience to a set of unimaginative caricatures and boring monoliths (as if black women think one way and gay men act one way). Walt Whitman famously wrote "I contain multitudes"—and Zadie Smith agrees that this is the right statement of common humanity, but she also suggests that we all discard the idea of "containing" people. We should be more porous, more open to the possibility of what human life can be, and we should let fiction liberate us from the carceral silos of identity politics.
Her weakest, and perhaps most controversial, essay is, ironically, "Shibboleth". Commenting on the campus protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict, Zadie Smith reflects on how language is euphemized and weaponized by political shorthands and simple slogans. It's easy to say 'Hamas'. It's easy to say 'Zionist colonialist state'. It's easy to utter a slogan like 'There is no such thing as the Palestinian people'. But as Zadie Smith argues, these reduce a complex people and intractable history into simple formulas. I agree to some extent, especially when I see these words echoed online and unmoored from reality. They are, in her view, more tribal calls than real policy statements. But I think there is a little bit of Periclean grandstanding here. After she meekly celebrates campus protesters and then pooh-poohs the academic jargon and political terms of debate, she invokes the nameless and numberless dead and calls for a ceasefire. I have no truck with ceasefires—but there is a certain degree of linguistic hypocrisy here as she summons the dead and transforms them into a plea: ceasefire. Naturally, however, one would have to wonder about the terms and durability of a ceasefire, the compromise and fallout involved, the strategic loss and longterm sufferings—on both sides. It's easy to invoke the dead in an argument. They cannot speak to correct you.
"Put me wherever you want," she says in the same article, "misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naive novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward." It's a sardonic kind of self-labelling, cloaking herself in all the invectives you can imagine for a progressive turncoat (except, obviously, the word turncoat), but that's the point. She never quite conforms to the creeds and language of progressive orthodoxy, and no label really fits. I wouldn't call her anything but a writer, one perhaps most like her literary heroes—James Baldwin and Joan Didion, two authors who are incredibly hard to pin down, both refusing to belong to or follow a single movement.
November 22, 2025
A triumph. Her musings on time and age in particular hit home.
September 14, 2025
Zadie! Yes! She is an amazing thinker and an impressive writer. A great, yes I said great collection of essays that are arranged cohesively making this an exceptional reading experience. Her thoughts on being a writer and the writing process were very illuminating. Her pieces on art, particularly Kara Walker has given me a new appreciation for art and how I’ll view it moving forward. Parts IV and V, Mourning and Confessing were standouts for me. All throughout this collection Zadie’s talent with the pen is on full display. I think she is deserving for a place in my prosey posse. Stay tuned! Book will be available October 28, 2025
November 23, 2025
Time spent in Zadie Smith’s mind is always the time well spent
Read
January 18, 2026As always, she's infinitely readable. Offers more ruminations on time passing and death as a collection of essays than Feel Free did. Some very lovely eulogies to other writers. She says something like 'writing essays is easy because it's just opinion', but I think making your opinion read as engaging as hers is no small feat.
July 12, 2025
I have read Zadie Smith in the past, enjoyed her stories, and Iove her writing style, but this was absolutely stunning. I really enjoyed the eclectic scope of essays. From the film, Tar, Hilary Mantel, social media, to politics and more, It was almost as if Zadie wrote this book with my own interests in mind. That’s how much I loved it.
This read FRESH, I know such topics have been touched on before but not like this. I honestly didn’t have any wild expectations when I started but I can honestly say I am buying a copy for myself and others. It was the boost I didn’t know I needed.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin General UK - Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Penguin Life, Penguin Business for this ARC.
This read FRESH, I know such topics have been touched on before but not like this. I honestly didn’t have any wild expectations when I started but I can honestly say I am buying a copy for myself and others. It was the boost I didn’t know I needed.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin General UK - Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Penguin Life, Penguin Business for this ARC.
December 23, 2025
Woah. What an absolute intellectual beast Smith is. Although I dipped in and out of these pieces over the course of a month, and even though I was never exactly sure what the hell Smith was on about, her essays were incredibly rich, dense in cultural criticism, and gave my brain a spa now that I’m freshly out of my doomscrolling era.
I love how the book opens with the idea that a collection of essays is like a guided tour through a museum. It gives us readers the choice to play around and find pieces that spark intrigue. And through all of it, Smith’s voice as the tour guide, her know-it-all, unsolicited comments is like a magnet that attracts you to topics that you’ve never cared about before. I find this very similar to David Foster Wallace; I don’t like lobster that much, and definitely wouldn’t go to the Maine Lobster Festival in my spare time, but DFW has given me strong feelings about both. With Smith, the same goes for Todd Haynes’ Tár, or the life of Celia Paul, or some random AI video that Trump made about his future for Gaza.
I cannot wait to spend more time in Zadie Smith’s brain.
I love how the book opens with the idea that a collection of essays is like a guided tour through a museum. It gives us readers the choice to play around and find pieces that spark intrigue. And through all of it, Smith’s voice as the tour guide, her know-it-all, unsolicited comments is like a magnet that attracts you to topics that you’ve never cared about before. I find this very similar to David Foster Wallace; I don’t like lobster that much, and definitely wouldn’t go to the Maine Lobster Festival in my spare time, but DFW has given me strong feelings about both. With Smith, the same goes for Todd Haynes’ Tár, or the life of Celia Paul, or some random AI video that Trump made about his future for Gaza.
I cannot wait to spend more time in Zadie Smith’s brain.
January 27, 2026
very much enjoyed this one. I haven't read any of Zadie Smith's essays, was pleasantly surprised by how accessible, funny and generous they were. Not unlike her interviews. Lots of thoughts on how algorithms mediate time, how there is radical/positive potential in refusing algorithms from entering every single part of our lives. Her more anecdotal/personal writing is always so funny and warm, particularly the chapter on her teenage years.
January 31, 2026
There’s no one better.
November 23, 2025
If it's written by Zadie Smith, I'm going to read it, fiction or non fiction. I will even read it if I'm not particularly interested in the subject, because her interest will interest me.
I found something to admire and to ponder in each of these essays, but was fascinated by 3 in particular:
- Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction
- Some Notes on Mediated Time
- The Dream of the Raised Arm
My fantasy dinner party would be incomplete if Zadie couldn't make it.
I found something to admire and to ponder in each of these essays, but was fascinated by 3 in particular:
- Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction
- Some Notes on Mediated Time
- The Dream of the Raised Arm
My fantasy dinner party would be incomplete if Zadie couldn't make it.
November 21, 2025
I usually visit essays or short stories between novels, but I couldn't help but give this my full attention essay by essay. Each time I would finish an essay I would close the book, and bask in a state of admiration for Zadie Smith. Oh and how humbling she is to read! There were a good amount of references, or even full on essays that I knew nothing about. I never watched the movie or heard of the artist, but it didn't really matter. For me, it was less about the content, and more about the way Zadie Smith thinks. I mean, its also about the content, but I feet like Zadie could take just about anything and create a dialogue about our culture, or better yet about humanity.
January 6, 2026
Zadie Smith, my new humanist existentialist friend. I appreciated her many deeply thoughtful, grounded insights into identity, community, writing, art, and social and political dialogue. In many places she has a different perspective from me, but to her that seems to be the whole magic of writing: communicating the world as she sees it, as an invitation to the reader to consider where their own attention and experiences have led them. In her own words, “Some books tell you what to think; other books allow you space to think alongside them, and have thoughts of your own.” I’m looking forward to reading her novels.
October 29, 2025
Out now!
My favorite of the incomparable Zadie Smith’s essay collections: the tightest and most current (at least, current according to when I read them all).
My favorite of the incomparable Zadie Smith’s essay collections: the tightest and most current (at least, current according to when I read them all).
November 29, 2025
Smith compiles her essays on arts (e.g., creative writing, visual arts) and politics (i.e., distribution of wealth and power across different classes, genders, and races) in Dead and Alive. Her “you catch more with honey” tone is not only a compelling tactic; what strikes me most is how she also presents her opinions with a distinguished air of wisdom and situatedness that makes a reader want to lean in, listen closely, and learn from. Perhaps Smith’s appreciative section on her literary heroes in Part IV best exemplifies this. I could keep celebrating her sources of inspiration if she were to publish an entire book on the writers she respects.
October 28, 2025
Given that I had not then liked “The Fraud” all that much, this collection of essays reconciled me with my idea of Zadie Smith. The part I enjoyed the most was clearly the one on the Obituaries of some famous writers, on which I agree with most of Smith's opinions, although I have a huge gap to fill as far as Hilary Mantel is concerned. The couple of essays that refer to the pandemic however, always have the effect of a dystopia for me, as if I can't believe we survived that too....
Considerato che "The Fraud" non mi era poi piaciuto tantissimo, questa raccolta di saggi mi ha riconciliato con la mia idea di Zadie Smith. La parte che mi é piaciuta di piú é stata chiaramente quella sugli Obituaries di alcuni famosi scrittori, sui quali condivido la maggior parte delle opinioni della Smith, pur avendo una grandissima lacuna da colmare per quello che riguarda Hilary Mantel. Il paio di saggi che fanno riferimento alla pandemia comunque, mi fanno sempre l'effetto di una distopia, come se non riuscissi a crederci che siamo sopravvissuti anche a questo...
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
Considerato che "The Fraud" non mi era poi piaciuto tantissimo, questa raccolta di saggi mi ha riconciliato con la mia idea di Zadie Smith. La parte che mi é piaciuta di piú é stata chiaramente quella sugli Obituaries di alcuni famosi scrittori, sui quali condivido la maggior parte delle opinioni della Smith, pur avendo una grandissima lacuna da colmare per quello che riguarda Hilary Mantel. Il paio di saggi che fanno riferimento alla pandemia comunque, mi fanno sempre l'effetto di una distopia, come se non riuscissi a crederci che siamo sopravvissuti anche a questo...
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
November 16, 2025
Zadie Smith is a prolific writer, & I generally find her work to be profound & quite well thought-out. I was therefore, a bit surprised by how preachy I found this collection of essays. I was even more so surprised by the holier-than-thou attitude connected with her thoughts on the Israel/Palestine conflict — though she continuously claims throughout the piece that she has not chosen a side. As someone who has the capacity to reach the audience that she does, I think she has an obligation to be more careful in denouncing an entire ethnicity. I am not certain why she felt that this subject was within her purview, but as someone who was directly impacted by the effects of October 7th & thereafter — not indirectly, not ‘being so proud of violent protests taking place on college campuses’ — I wish she had chosen to keep her opinions on the righteousness of harming others in pursuit of revolution to herself.
December 2, 2025
Smith is a delight when she talks about writing or the arts, and full of cliches when her subject is politics.
December 19, 2025
This was my first foray into Zadie Smith and I thoroughly loved it. I have subconsciously avoided her books, though I have seen them at bookstores a lot. And unfortunately my introduction to her was via a critical essay by Andrea Long Chu, whereby, she highlighted how Zadie would be team neutral, even when it has to do with genocide or other areas that do deserve a more clearer stance. I will say - the essays about the Gaza crisis and Trump’s AI video about Gaza revamp - didn’t help at all. I’ll get it out of the way, but at times I found Zadie extremely cautious around more thornier topics and it can come off very disingenuous and passive that a reader is left to wonder- does she actually stand for anything? Due to not being able to make her mark at times, she ends up using far much more words than necessary. However, this was my biggest issue and now that it is out of the way, the good stuff.
I did find vast majority of the remaining essays quite brilliant. She has a humungous appetite - visual arts, authors, introspection, consciousness, mourning and much, much more. And I love when with a lot of these, she stays with them very delicately to build a world. Such as her perspective of her once trying to commit suicide (or what is an accident, she herself isn’t quite so sure). Or what happens with youth back when she was in her youth, versus the youth now who have access to infinite amount of internet and who are valued at $270 LTV (lifetime value) by Facebook per teenager. These are intricate, complex and worthy of our attention- yet most people ignore such topics in favor for whatever is more popular. Yet she pleads, to not let our consciousness be driven by large corporations and models. To allow our imagination and consciousness to have its freedom and resist the attention economy. Through and through, in a lot of these essays, you can tell there’s a certain critical eye she leaves for herself - which gives this book a warm texture, that’s definitely her signature voice (something she mentions - how she can tell when it’s a James Baldwin writing, versus Toni Morrison).
I highly recommend this book.
I did find vast majority of the remaining essays quite brilliant. She has a humungous appetite - visual arts, authors, introspection, consciousness, mourning and much, much more. And I love when with a lot of these, she stays with them very delicately to build a world. Such as her perspective of her once trying to commit suicide (or what is an accident, she herself isn’t quite so sure). Or what happens with youth back when she was in her youth, versus the youth now who have access to infinite amount of internet and who are valued at $270 LTV (lifetime value) by Facebook per teenager. These are intricate, complex and worthy of our attention- yet most people ignore such topics in favor for whatever is more popular. Yet she pleads, to not let our consciousness be driven by large corporations and models. To allow our imagination and consciousness to have its freedom and resist the attention economy. Through and through, in a lot of these essays, you can tell there’s a certain critical eye she leaves for herself - which gives this book a warm texture, that’s definitely her signature voice (something she mentions - how she can tell when it’s a James Baldwin writing, versus Toni Morrison).
I highly recommend this book.
June 11, 2025
*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review*.
Dead and Alive is a new collection of essays by Zadie Smith. Smith writes on many topics including Celia Paul, Michael Jackson, Queen Elizabeth II, New York, being a writer and there are some memorial pieces on authors who have died such as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel.
This essay collection was truly phenomenal and I loved every second. Since finishing the essays I keep thinking about this collection as a whole and I feel so much towards it. This is a must read for anyone who likes reading essays/commentary. I loved reading the essays on mourning with the one on Joan Didion being a favourite. I also loved reading about the Egyptian novelist, Ahmed Naji. The commentary on phones and social media was particularly impactful and I just think this whole collection was so strong. Zadie Smith is not afraid to say what she believes in and I’m going to be thinking about this collection for a long time.
Favourite Quotes:
“The dream of Frantz Fanon was not the replacement of one unjust power with another unjust power; it was a revolutionary humanism, neither assimilationist nor supremacist, in which the Manichaean logic of dominant/ submissive as it applies to people is finally and completely dismantled, and the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonization.”
AND
“We pity the olden-day people who didn't realize how not OK or out of touch their sentences were because no one was there to tell them so moments after they'd written them. As if the centuries of writing prior to 2008 - and all those naive oldey-timey artists who did not have access, moment by moment to the general mood - were by definition irresponsible!”
Dead and Alive is a new collection of essays by Zadie Smith. Smith writes on many topics including Celia Paul, Michael Jackson, Queen Elizabeth II, New York, being a writer and there are some memorial pieces on authors who have died such as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel.
This essay collection was truly phenomenal and I loved every second. Since finishing the essays I keep thinking about this collection as a whole and I feel so much towards it. This is a must read for anyone who likes reading essays/commentary. I loved reading the essays on mourning with the one on Joan Didion being a favourite. I also loved reading about the Egyptian novelist, Ahmed Naji. The commentary on phones and social media was particularly impactful and I just think this whole collection was so strong. Zadie Smith is not afraid to say what she believes in and I’m going to be thinking about this collection for a long time.
Favourite Quotes:
“The dream of Frantz Fanon was not the replacement of one unjust power with another unjust power; it was a revolutionary humanism, neither assimilationist nor supremacist, in which the Manichaean logic of dominant/ submissive as it applies to people is finally and completely dismantled, and the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonization.”
AND
“We pity the olden-day people who didn't realize how not OK or out of touch their sentences were because no one was there to tell them so moments after they'd written them. As if the centuries of writing prior to 2008 - and all those naive oldey-timey artists who did not have access, moment by moment to the general mood - were by definition irresponsible!”
November 19, 2025
Zadie Smith’s essays are subtle, smart and self aware. This book contains the most nuanced and unflinching essay I have ever read about the concept of cultural appropriation, deeply thought and sure to discomfit anyone, no matter what side of the debate we think we’re on. Indeed, an underlying theme of the book is the paucity of the concept of debate as played out on social media. Smith is aware of the shibboleths we all use to identify our group and make ourselves comfortable and pushes back against this with true moral courage.
This book made me feel very interested in things I did not expect to be interested in, most notably the career of artist Celia Paul.
Smith is a wonderful companion through it all. She lays out devastating logical arguments - for example, about the villainy of our attitudes toward the environment - alongside sly acknowledgement of a sort of hypocrisy common to us all - her comments on her own use of plastic water bottles hit close to home.
She is amazing when discussing James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Hillary Mantel.
I am afraid to say this is the first full length book I have read by Smith. I have only previously encountered essays here and there. I need to fix this. She’s amazing.
This book made me feel very interested in things I did not expect to be interested in, most notably the career of artist Celia Paul.
Smith is a wonderful companion through it all. She lays out devastating logical arguments - for example, about the villainy of our attitudes toward the environment - alongside sly acknowledgement of a sort of hypocrisy common to us all - her comments on her own use of plastic water bottles hit close to home.
She is amazing when discussing James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Hillary Mantel.
I am afraid to say this is the first full length book I have read by Smith. I have only previously encountered essays here and there. I need to fix this. She’s amazing.
December 20, 2025
This is a collection of essays, forewords and introductions, speeches, obituaries, and interviews. They’re loosely connected, but all filtered through Zadie Smith’s voice and worldview. A lot of these pieces made me immediately seek out the work she’s responding to. My TBR grew, my watch list grew, and I waslooking up art, films, and podcasts as I went. It forces you to sit with colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, feminism, and culture more broadly, approached from different angles and levels of intimacy. I wish I had a physical copy. This is not an end-to-end, power-through kind of book, it didn’t suit the ebook review format I had. It is an easy recommendation for thoughtful, bite-sized essays that double as excellent discussion starters. Lucian Freud: hate it. Tár: now I’m desperate to see it. Stormzy: give me more. Kara Walker: awe, moving, haunting. Las Culturistas: love finding another Reader. Joan Didion: yes. Toni Morrison: always yes. Overall, read it, take notes, and let it take you well beyond the bounds of these pages.
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for access to this book.
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for access to this book.
February 1, 2026
Some Essayists - e.g. John Jeremiah Sullivan - dazzle with their observation and ability to see a thing in a way that their reader hasn't. Or sometimes to simply decide to look where their reader won't. Others dazzle instead with their personal analysis and forced introspection that arises out of their chosen topics. In this measure, Zadie Smith is my favorite. With the Sullivans of the world, I eagerly await their new essays. With Ms. Smith (and her like), I find myself instead yearning for a conversation. Her mind seems specially tuned to serve and volley, open to ideas, as ready for debate as it is to accept its biases and mistakes. I love to read her work but would give it all up to have coffee and a conversation with her
November 24, 2025
3.5
I really enjoyed some of these essays, in particular the ones about other writers, like Joan Didion and Toni Morrison, as well as Hilary Mantel. Some of the other essays, on current events, felt a bit more clumsy, a bit too chatty and without (I thought) bringing anything particularly new or original. I like her writing and her style though and found them pleasant to read.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
I really enjoyed some of these essays, in particular the ones about other writers, like Joan Didion and Toni Morrison, as well as Hilary Mantel. Some of the other essays, on current events, felt a bit more clumsy, a bit too chatty and without (I thought) bringing anything particularly new or original. I like her writing and her style though and found them pleasant to read.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
December 28, 2025
An invitation to think, about lots of things: the political, the literary and the personal. Smith quietly and generously offers a way to see that defies the dominant cultural dictum of binary championing or condemnation. She is not “for” or “against” you, she wants you to decide for yourself, about politics, about writing, about art. But read it first. As she says: “So decide”.
January 1, 2026
“Reading this book is a bracing experience.” - Zadie Smith, on Black England (Gretchen Gerzina)
the perfect phrase for this brilliant collection of essays: a bracing experience
a flair of neapolitan in here
deconstructing the pyramid
my favorite contributions (each one was an embryo in its own right):
1) “Daughters of Toni” (on Toni Morrison)
2) “Agelessness”
3) “The Fall”
the perfect phrase for this brilliant collection of essays: a bracing experience
a flair of neapolitan in here
deconstructing the pyramid
my favorite contributions (each one was an embryo in its own right):
1) “Daughters of Toni” (on Toni Morrison)
2) “Agelessness”
3) “The Fall”
January 10, 2026
Sublime. I questioned many a thing in these pages but I don’t see that as a negative—the space to think for yourself (instead of being told what to think) and to argue (mentally) with an author’s points is a sign of good literature. She is perhaps an even better essayist than a novelist, and that’s saying a lot.
January 18, 2026
Zadie Smith can WRITE. Like all short story collections, I loved some of these and was bored through others although she has such a beautiful way of looking at the world its hard not to be a fan of all of it.
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