Zadie Smith Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. White Teeth (2000)
  2. The Autograph Man (2002)
  3. On Beauty (2005)
  4. NW (2012)
  5. Swing Time (2016)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Embassy of Cambodia (2013)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Martha and Hanwell (2003)
  2. Grand Union (2019)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Burned Children of America (With: Dave Eggers) (2003)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Changing My Mind (2009)
  2. Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (With: Michael Rosen,Jeanette Winterson,Mark Haddon) (2011)
  3. Feel Free (2018)
  4. Intimations (2020)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Piece of Flesh (1999)
  2. The Burned Children of America (2003)
  3. The Book of Other People (2007)
  4. The Library Book (2012)
  5. The Best American Essays 2013 (2013)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Zadie Smith Books Overview

White Teeth

On New Year’s morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie working class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20 pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop annoyed that Archie’s car is blocking his delivery area comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel. Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families one headed by Archie, the other by Archie’s best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie the Jamaican word for ‘no problem’. Samad devoutly Muslim, hopelessly ‘foreign’ weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot smoking punk militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire’s worth of cultural identity, history, and hope. Zadie Smith’s dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant caf , a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes faith, race, gender, history, and culture and triumphs.

The Autograph Man

We live in a world of signs. But not everybody has to trade in them…
. Alex Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, his business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the reinstatement of some kind of all powerful, benevolent God type figure, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries. The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour around the hollow things of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. Through London and then New York, searching for the only autograph that has ever mattered to him, Alex follows the paper trail while resisting the mystical lure of Kabbalah and Zen, and avoiding all collectors, con men, and interfering rabbis who would put themselves in his path. Pushing against the tide of his generation, Alex Li is on his way to finding enlightenment, otherwise known as some part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated, or sold.

On Beauty

Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn’t like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore. Then Jerome, Howard’s older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives. How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it? Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith’s third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people’s deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.

The Burned Children of America (With: Dave Eggers)

This volume brings together the most promising young American authors, with a penchant for writing about such slippery subjects as snakes, letter writing dogs, chicken livers and indoor shopping malls.

Changing My Mind

A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith’s nonfiction over the past decade.

Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.

Split into four sections ‘Reading,’ ‘Being,’ ‘Seeing,’ and ‘Feeling’ Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith’s unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays some published here for the first time on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.

In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others have had on her writing life and her self understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide ranging experiences in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond that have nourished Smith’s rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.

Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (With: Michael Rosen,Jeanette Winterson,Mark Haddon)

In Vintage’s 21st anniversary year, this book is a mission statement about the paramount importance of reading to our quality of life. In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams. Why should you stop what you’re doing and read a book? But people have always needed stories. We need literature novels, poetry because we need to make sense of our lives, test our depths, understand our joys, and discover what humans are capable of. Great books can provide companionship when we are lonely or peacefulness in the midst of the commuter rush. Reading provides a unique kind of pleasure and no one should live without it. The ten essays in this book tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken forgranted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention make books one of them.

The Book of Other People

A stellar host of writers explore the cornerstone of fiction writing: character The Book of Other People is about character. Twenty five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures. But the purpose of the book is variety: straight ‘realism’ if such a thing exists is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples. The writers featured in The Book of Other People include: Aleksandar Hemon Nick Hornby Hari Kunzru Toby Litt David Mitchell George Saunders Colm T ib n Chris Ware, and more

The Library Book

‘Hill provides us with a reading list the equal of any degree course.’ The Times LondonIn pursuit of a book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year long voyage through her books in order to get to know her own collection again. Susan Hill is the winner of numerous prestigious literary awards. She is the author of a highly successful crime series as well as the famous The Woman in Black.

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