Dead and Alive Essays

A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays

In the past two decades, few writers have been able to master the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her discerning eye and singularly intimate perspective emblazon Smith as a preeminent critic of our generation, society, and culture. In her inimitable honesty and poignant voice, Smith studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds within them grounds for solidarity and compassion.

This eagerly awaited new collection brings Zadie Smith’s unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools personal dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk when researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to look at the young Michael Jackson and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.

A master of perception always in search of a lesser-known reality, Smith continually assesses, and reassesses, what it means to identify with the contemporary world, and how we choose to remember the history that brought us here.