The first ever collection of stories from the bestselling and beloved author of  Swing Time  and  White Teeth     'Zadie Smith is the best writer of our generation' Gary Shteyngart    'Her dialogue is pitch-perfect, her comic timing masterful... [And] she also delivers a sophisticated commentary on race, gender, class, celebrity and power'  Telegraph  on  Swing Time       'Smith is virtuosic, as ever, on family and friendship, and her ability to write about large-scale social injustice without losing her neutral novelist's gaze is breathtaking'  Times Literary Supplement  on  Swing Time     In the summer of 1959, an Antiguan immigrant in north west London lives the last day of his life, unknowingly caught in someone else's story of hate and division, resistance and revolt.  A mother looks back on her early forays into matters of the human heart - and other parts of the human body - considering the ways in which desire is always an act of negotiation, destruction, and self-invention.  A disgraced cop stands amid the broken shards of his life, unable to move forward into a future that holds no place for him.  Moral panic spreads like contagion through the upper echelons of New York City - and the cancelled people look disconcertingly like the rest of us.  A teenage scion of the technocratic elite chases spectres through a premium virtual reality, trailed by a little girl with a runny nose and no surviving family.  We all take a much-needed break from this mess, on a package holiday where the pool's electric blue is ceaselessly replenished, while political and environmental collapse happen far away, to someone else.  Interleaving ten completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the  New Yorker  and elsewhere, Zadie Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian,  Grand Union  is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.

GRAND UNION

Maniant le loufoque, la satire et l'humour avec un art consommé, Zadie Smith produit ici un premier roman détonant, qui frappe par son ambition et son extraordinaire énergie. Ajoutons l'actualité des sujets abordés et la vitalité d'une prose qui se colore de tous les accents de la terre.

Sourires de loup

Takes us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, absorbing, this title suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger.

THE EMBASSY OF CAMBODIA

"NW" is Zadie Smith's masterful novel about London life. Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic "NW" follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they've made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel. A portrait of modern urban life, "NW" is funny, sad and urgent - as brimming with vitality as the city itself. Praise for "NW": "Her dialogue sings and soars; terse, packed and sassy. Smith is simply wonderful: Dickens' legitimate daughter". (Boyd Tonkin, "Independent"). "Astonishing, dazzling. Really - without exaggeration - not since Dickens has there been a better observer of London scenes. Zadie Smith is a genius. It's hard to imagine a better novel this year - or this decade". (A.N. Wilson). "Intensely funny, richly varied, always unexpected. A joyous, optimistic, angry masterpiece. No better English novel will be published this year". ("Philip Hensher, "Daily Telegraph"). "Absolutely brilliant. So electrically authentic". ("Time). "Captivating. Funny, sexy, weird, full of acute social comedy, like London. She's up there with the best around". ("Evening Standard"). "Marvellous ...crackles with reflections on race, music and migration. A lyrical fiction for our times". ("Spectator"). "Undeniably brilliant ...rush out and buy this book". ("Observer"). Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of the novels "White Teeth", "The Autograph Man" and "On Beauty", and of a collection of essays, "Changing My Mind". She is also the editor of "The Book of Other People".

Ceux du Nord-Ouest

Changing my mind

Leah, Nathalie, Félix et Nathan ont grandi dans la cité de Caldwell, au nord-ouest de Londres. Ils se sont connus, aimés, ou juste frôlés, puis ils ont pris leur envol. Mais à l'approche de la quarantaine, ils vivent toujours dans ce quartier cosmopolite, où cohabitent la misère et une certaine réussite sociale.
Leah, qui semblait pleine de talent, végète dans une association caritative. Elle ne veut pas d'enfant, contrairement à son mari, alors elle prend la pilule en cachette. Nathalie n'a pas toujours été Nathalie : elle a choisi de changer de prénom, espérant ainsi effacer la trace de son héritage familial. Son angoisse? Ressembler à sa mère ou à sa soeur, qui triment pour payer leur loyer, nourrir leurs enfants, et se consolent en allant à l'église. Mais elle a réussi : mariée, mère de deux enfants, elle est devenue avocate. Nathan, lui, n'a pas su échapper à la drogue et son fantôme hante le quartier. Félix enfin croit bien s'en être sorti et s'apprête à conclure l'affaire du siècle.
Pourtant un drame va traverser l'existence de ces personnages et d'une certaine manière les lier à tout jamais. Zadie Smith s'infiltre dans les pensées, les souvenirs de ses personnages, pour dresser un portrait impressionniste du quartier de son enfance, à la manière d'une Virginia Woolf du XXIe siècle.

Sourires De Loup: Roman

Book of the Year 2023 according to New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, Economist, Observer, The Spectator, Financial Times, Vogue, The Times, The Oldie, i Paper, The Standard, Washington Post, Independent, Daily ExpressSHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS' PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024ONE OF SARAH JESSICA PARKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2024'A writer at the peak of her powers' The TelegraphTruth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel. Kilburn, 1873. The 'Tichborne Trial' has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be - or an imposter. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her novelist cousin and his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England of being a land of façades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle meanwhile finds himself the star witness, his future depending on telling the right story. Growing up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica, he knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise. Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about how in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what's true can prove a complicated task.'It's difficult to give any idea of how extraordinary this book is. One of the great historical novels, certainly. But has any historical novel ever combined such brilliantly researched and detailed history with such intensely imagined fiction? Or such a range of living, breathing, surprising characters with such an idiosyncratically structured narrative?' Michael Frayn'As always it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith's mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive' New York Times'Zadie Smith's Victorian-set masterpiece holds a mirror up to Britain .

The Fraud - The instant Sunday Times bestseller

La giovane autrice-bestseller dei romanzi Denti bianchi, L'uomo autografo e Della bellezza, acclamata dalla critica come una delle voci più importanti della narrativa anglofona contemporanea, tradotta e amata in tutto il mondo, pubblica per la prima volta un'opera di saggistica, e sceglie di farlo in Italia con minimum fax. Cambiare idea raccoglie articoli, recensioni, saggi (alcuni dei quali apparsi in Italia sulle pagine di Internazionale) che spaziano dalla letteratura al cinema alla politica, fino alla confessione personale. Zadie Smith analizza l'opera di classici della letteratura come Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, E. M. Forster e il recentemente scomparso David Foster Wallace; racconta la propria esperienza personale nelle bidonville della Liberia al fianco dei responsabili di una ong, ma anche negli hotel di Los Angeles durante la settimana degli Oscar; rievoca la grandezza di attrici come Katharine Hepburn e Anna Magnani e riflette sulla potenza retorica di Barack Obama; scrive pagine rivelatrici sul processo creativo della scrittura, e sulle dinamiche familiari che hanno contribuito a formare i suoi gusti e la sua personalità. A ciascuno di questi argomenti applica una lucidità di sguardo e un'originalità di pensiero affascinanti, e uno stile brillante, già ben noto ai suoi lettori, che mescola rigore e ironia. Il risultato è una ricognizione godibilissima quanto autorevole di mille aspetti del nostro panorama culturale; ma anche una sorta di diario personale in cui scopriamo, quasi senza filtro, le passioni, i gusti, le idiosincrasie di una scrittrice di straordinario talento.

Cambiare idea

Depuis une dizaine d’années, Zadie Smith publie des « essais ponctuels » comme elle aime à les appeler, dans les journaux et revues les plus prestigieux d’Amérique et d’Angleterre. Changer d’avis (« au fil des ans l’opinion que l’on croit sienne évolue ») les rassemble. Zadie Smith y déploie toute l’étendue de sa curiosité, et écrit avec passion sur les multiples sujets qui lui tiennent à cœur – la lecture, l’écriture, le cinéma, le voyage, Barack Obama, le langage, le métissage... Le style est flamboyant, l’esprit aiguisé, l’humour irrésistible, l’érudition toujours discrète, l’humilité assumée, l’empathie partout présente. À noter tout particulièrement, le magistral hommage à l’auteur américain David Foster Wallace, disparu en 2008, qui clôt le recueil. Analyse approfondie et ludique d’une œuvre foisonnante et parfois difficile, ce long texte est également un bouleversant témoignage qui nous rappelle la première fonction de l’écrivain : s’interroger sur ce que cela veut dire « vivre conscients, en adultes, jour après jour. »

Changer d'avis

SWING TIME

White teeth

Sourires De Loup

Leah, Nathalie, Félix et Nathan ont grandi dans la cité de Caldwell, au nord-ouest de Londres. Ils se sont connus, aimés, ou juste frôlés, puis ils ont pris leur envol. Mais à l'approche de la quarantaine, ils vivent toujours dans ce quartier cosmopolite, où cohabitent la misère et une certaine réussite sociale. Leah, qui semblait pleine de talent, végète dans une association caritative. Elle ne veut pas d’enfant, contrairement à son mari, alors elle prend la pilule en cachette. Nathalie n’a pas toujours été Nathalie : elle a choisi de changer de prénom, espérant ainsi effacer la trace de son héritage familial. Son angoisse? Ressembler à sa mère ou à sa sœur, qui triment pour payer leur loyer, nourrir leurs enfants, et se consolent en allant à l’église. Mais elle a réussi : mariée, mère de deux enfants, elle est devenue avocate. Nathan, lui, n’a pas su échapper à la drogue et son fantôme hante le quartier. Félix enfin croit bien s'en être sorti et s'apprête à conclure l'affaire du siècle. Pourtant un drame va traverser l'existence de ces personnages et d'une certaine manière les lier à tout jamais. Zadie Smith s’infiltre dans les pensées, les souvenirs de ses personnages, pour dresser un portrait impressionniste du quartier de son enfance, à la manière d'une Virginia Woolf du XXIe siècle.

Zadie Smith, née le 25 octobre 1975 à Brent, dans le Grand Londres, est une romancière, essayiste, enseignante et critique littéraire britannique.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadie_Smith

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