Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as two collection of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, and Grand Union.
“This is a story at once intimate and global, as much about
childhood friendship as international aid, as fascinated by the
fate of an unemployed single mother as it is by the omnipotence of
a world-class singer . . . Smith’s attention to the grace notes of
friendship is as precise as ever . . . Swing Time uses its
extraordinary breadth and its syncopated structure to turn the
issues of race and class in every direction…We finally have a big
social novel nimble enough to keep all its diverse parts moving
gracefully toward a vision of what really matters in this life when
the music stops.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
“A dance itself, syncopated, unexpected, and vital . . . Swing
Time may not parse easily and fits no mold, but it is
uncommonly full of life.” —Claire Messud, The New York Review of
Books
“A multilayered tour-de-force . . . Smith burnishes her place in
the literary firmament with her fifth novel . . . The work is so
absorbing that a reader might flip it open randomly and be
immediately caught up. Its precision is thrilling even as it grows
into a book-length meditation on cultural appropriation, played out
on a celebrity-besotted global stage . . . Smith’s novels are set
in motion by character, complex portraits that are revelatory of
race and class.” —Karen Long, Los Angeles Times
“Brilliant . . . With Swing Time, Zadie Smith identifies the
impossible contradiction all adults are asked to maintain—be true
to yourself, and still contain multitudes; be proud of your
heritage, but don't be defined by it. She frays the cords that keep
us tied to our ideas of who we are, to our careful
self-mythologies. Some writers name, organize, and contain; Smith
lets contradictions bloom, in all their frightening, uneasy
splendor.” —Annalisa Quinn, NPR.org
“Smith’s most affecting novel in a decade, one that brings a
piercing focus to her favorite theme: the struggle to weave
disparate threads of experience into a coherent story of a self . .
. As the book progresses, she interleaves chapters set in the
present with ones that deal with memories of college, of home, of
Tracey. It is a graceful technique, this metronomic swinging back
and forth in time . . . The novel’s structure feels true to the
effect of memory, the way we use the past as ballast for the
present. And it feels true, too, to the mutable structure of
identity, that complex, composite ‘we,’ liable to shift and break
and reshape itself as we recall certain pieces of our earlier lives
and suppress others.” —Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
“Every once in a while, a novel reminds us of why we still need
them. Building upon the promise of White Teeth, written almost two
decades ago, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time boldly reimagines the
classically English preoccupation with class and status for a new
era—in which race, gender, and the strange distortions of
contemporary celebrity meet on a global stage . . . No detail feels
extraneous, least of all the book’s resonant motif, the sankofa
bird, with its backward-arching neck—suggestive less of a dancer
than of an author, looking to her origins to understand the path
ahead.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“[Smith] revisits familiar themes from her previous
books—multicultural society, family, race, identity—but her
convictions are stronger and her scope wider . . . A powerful story
of lives marred by secrets, unfulfilled potential and the
unjustness of the world. But she has interwoven it with another
beautiful story of the dances people do to rise above it
all.” —The Economist
“As soulful as it is crafty.” —Lena Dunham, Lenny
“Wise and illuminating . . . Smith is a master stylist, delivering
revelatory sentences in prose that never once veers into
showiness.” —USA Today
“Culturally rich, globally aware and politically sharp . . . One
sentence of Zadie Smith can entertain you for several minutes . . .
Both a stunning writer on the sentence level and a cunning,
trap-setting, theme-braiding storyteller, with Swing
Time Zadie Smith has written one of her very best
books.” —Newsday
“A brimming love of humanity in all its mad and perplexing forms
animates [Smith’s] fiction, along with a lifelong infatuation with
the city of London . . . Swing Time can rightly be called a
return to the kind of fiction Smith does best . . .
Sparkling.” —Laura Miller, Slate
“Smith’s thrilling cultural insights never overshadow the wholeness
of her characters, who are so keenly observed that one feels
witness to their lives.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Absorbing . . . Smith tackles meaty subjects—including friendship
and race—with her customary insight and
grace.” —People
“Smith delivers a page-turner that’s also beautifully written (a
rare combo), but best of all, she doesn’t sidestep the painful
stuff.” —Glamour, “November’s Must Read”
“A sweeping meditation on art, race, and identity that may be
[Smith’s] most ambitious work yet.” —Esquire
“Transfixing, wide-ranging (from continents to emotions to
footwork).” —Marie Claire
“A thoughtful tale of two childhood BFFs whose shared passion for
dance takes them on wildly divergent life
paths.” —Cosmopolitan
“[Swing Time] makes a remarkable leap in technique. Smith has
become increasingly adept at combining social comedy and more
existential concerns—manners and morals—through the flexibility of
her voice, layering irony on feeling and vice versa. In a culture
that often reduces identity politics to a kind of personal
branding, Smith works the same questions into a far deeper (and
more truly political) consideration of what it takes to form a self
. . . Swing Time’s great achievement is its full-throated and
embodied account of the tension between personal potential and what
is actually possible.” —The New Republic
“Vibrant . . . [An] agile, propulsive coming-of-age novel . . .
Smith’s humor is both sharp and sly as she skewers various targets,
including humorless, petty social activists and celebrity culture’s
inflated sense of importance.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Splendid . . . The narrator’s wry voice, mostly sharply self-aware
but occasionally painfully not so, is just one of the strengths
of Swing Time . . . Filled with energy and
grace.” —Tampa Bay Times
“Zadie Smith constantly amazes us with the dexterity of her
voice—or better yet, voices…In her latest offering, Smith returns
to North West London with new characters and an uncanny ability to
explore the complex nature of racism and its impact on individuals
and the community.” —Essence
“Remarkable . . . Smith is far too skilled and entertaining a
storyteller to deliver lectures, but race and class linger subtly
underneath all the events unfolding in Swing Time . .
. [A] rich, compelling novel.” —Dallas Morning News
“In each subsequent work [since White Teeth, Smith] has ever more
subtly charted the fraught territory where individual experience
negotiates social norms. In Swing Time, her first novel in the
first person, the transaction becomes more focused and personal,
and its cost to the individual powerfully and poignantly
clear.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“In her ability to capture the ferocity and fragility of such
[childhood] relationships, Smith resembles Elena
Ferrante.” —Boston Globe
“Not just a friendship but our whole mad, unjust world comes under
Smith’s beautifully precise scrutiny.” —New York Magazine
“The narrator's unaffected voice masks the structural complexity of
this novel, and its density. Every scene, every attribute pays
off.” —TIME Magazine
“Smith is one of our best living critics, and she has transposed
the instructive, contagious voice of her essays into Swing
Time. Like Smith the critic, Smith the novelist encourages us to
explore what has so enchanted her. Following the narrator, we too
can be mesmerized by clips of [Jeni] LeGon, by the feats of the
Nicholas brothers, and retrieve what risks being lost to the
past. Swing Time is criticism set to fiction, like dance
is set to music. One complements—and animates—the other.” —The
Atlantic
“As ever, the beauty of Smith’s work is in the grace and empathy
with which she crafts her characters.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The richness of ‘Swing Time’ lies in Ms. Smith’s spot-on
descriptions.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Stunning.” —SELF
“Swing Time is Zadie Smith’s fifth novel and for my money her
finest.” —The Guardian
“As intricate and beautiful as a ballet . . . A terrific book from
one of our greatest novelists.” —Vox
“Female friendship has become a literary focus in recent years, and
Zadie Smith’s take on the subject in Swing Time is my
favourite. Tracing the evolution of a childhood friendship into
adulthood, she bracingly portrays the compromises and bargains we
all eventually make. Smith’s idiosyncratic gaze and keen, supple
prose transform and elevate everything she touches.” —Jennifer
Egan, The Guardian’s Best Books of 2017
“A beautiful and accomplished novel that will stir in readers all
of those uncomfortable but necessary feelings of
nostalgia.” —Bustle
“Where [Smith] really shines is in creating characters so fully
realized, you actually forget that they’re
fictional.” —PureWow
“Meaty, long and complex, with sub-explorations that could each be
a novella or short story . . . The most satisfying contemporary
reading experience I’ve had since I discovered Elena Ferrante.”
—Flavorwire
“Frustrating and fascinating—and all the while gloriously
human—Smith’s characters take us through an entrancing exploration
of subjects such as race, class, friendship, talent, and much more,
giving us the world in all its great complexity and contradiction.”
—Buzzfeed, “Best Fiction Books Of 2016”
“Mesmerizing.” —Chicago Tribune
“A far-reaching, serio-comic rumination on race, privilege and
profound relationships between mothers and daughters, friends and
rivals, idols and followers.” —The Seattle Times
“This is a novel that will sweep you up in its rhythms.”
—Bustle
“Engrossing . . . A compelling, readable and weighty novel that
ponders what our relationships say about us and how complicit we
are in our own fate.” —Town & Country
“I can’t deny the spell cast by Swing Time, Zadie Smith’s
latest. I can’t hold back from declaring it first a career peak,
one she’ll be hard-pressed to top, and beyond that a steep
challenge for any novelist out there. Smith might well have left a
whole host of her contemporaries cold-cocked . . . If anyone’s
delivering reliable intel from the frontiers of the 21st century
cosmopolis, it’s Zadie Smith.” —Brooklyn Rail
“The incomparable cultural force that is Zadie Smith continues her
legacy of acute portrayals of carefully chosen slices of modern
life . . . A keenly-felt exploration of friendship, race, fame,
motherhood and the ineluctable truth that our origins will forever
determine our fates.” —Harper’s Bazaar, Best Books of 2016
“A virtuoso performance, filled with distinct and nuanced
observations about dance, race, class, celebrity, global culture,
appropriation and the special intimacies between girlfriends and
between mothers and daughters.” —BBC.com
“The day a new Zadie Smith book comes out should be a national
holiday.” —LitHub
“The book feels like the culmination of all her talents: a novel
with a gift for character and dialogue, a story rooted in a deep
cultural and racial awareness.” —Kevin Nguyen, Book of the
Month
“Agile and discerning . . . With homage to dance as a unifying
force, arresting observations . . . exceptionally diverse and
magnetizing characters, and lashing satire, Swing Time is an acidly
funny, fluently global, and head-spinning novel about the quest for
meaning, exaltation, and love . . . This tale of friendship lost
and found is going to be big.” —Booklist (starred)
“The narrative moves deftly and absorbingly between its
increasingly tense coming-of-age story and the adult life of the
sympathetic if naïve and sometimes troubling narrator . . . A rich
and sensitive drama highly recommended for all
readers.” —Library Journal (starred)
“A keen, controlled novel about dance and blackness steps onto a
stage of cultural land mines . . . Smith is dazzling in her
specificity, evoking predicaments, worldviews, and personalities
with a camera-vivid precision . . . Moving, funny, and grave, this
novel parses race and global politics with Fred Astaire’s or
Michael Jackson's grace.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“As ever, Smith plies her signature humor and sensitivity as she
traces the contours of race and lived experience.” —ELLE.com’s
Must-Read Books for Fall
“[A] powerful and complex novel . . . Rich and absorbing,
especially when it highlights Smith's ever-brilliant perspective on
pop culture.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
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