Zadie Smith (England, 1975)
Zadie Smith was born in North London to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997. As a child, Smith was fond of tap dancing,and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre. While at university, Smith earned money as a jazz singer. The publication of her first book, White Teeth, came during while she was still studying at university.
The publicity that arose from this commercial faith in her writing undoubtedly ensured the attention of literary critics once it was completed. Her work is broad ranging and often focused on deconstructing Western mythologies of racial stereotypes.
“You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.”
White Teeth
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...
Swing Time
Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
NW
Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end.
The Autograph Man
Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. 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 end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.