Feel Free: Essays

by Zadie Smith

AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, bestselling author of Swing Time and White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays

No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has boundless curiosity and the boundless wit to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect, set brilliantly against the context of the utterly contemporary, and considered with a deep humanity and compassion.

This electrifying new collection showcases its author as a true literary powerhouse, demonstrating once again her credentials as an essential voice of her generation.

• ISBN10: 0241146909
• ISBN13: 9780241146903
• Publish Date: 8 February 2018 (first published 6 February 2018)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 7 April 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Hamish Hamilton Ltd
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 464
• Language: English

Reviews

[funbreaker4opal]

I didn't really find this collection all that engaging.

[empressbrooke]

This is a difficult one to rate. Zadie Smith is someone who is friends with an actual philosopher. She frequents modern art installations and considers them very seriously. She gets genuine pleasure out of 24-hour long arthouse films that splice references to time in other movies together, and 6-volume memoirs that painstakingly detail every mundane moment in the author's life. She sincerely ruminates on Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. The Venn diagram for what Zadie Smith and I like does not have much overlap.

But then there were plenty of lovely essays on things from real life that kept me from putting it down unfinished. She sometimes deigned to talk about more mainstream entertainment - Get Out, Key & Peele, The Social Network, and even going all the way to the completely banal end of the spectrum comparing Justin Bieber to the works of philosopher Martin Buber.