Intimations: Six Essays - Softcover

Smith, Zadie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241492386 ISBN 13: 9780241492383

Publisher: Penguin, 2020

Synopsis

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 and an FT Best Book of the Year

Thought-provoking and deeply consoling, a perfectly distilled set of essays on the strangest year many of us have experienced, from one of our wisest and most humane thinkers

'As well as offering a new guide to living in a wild, messy and unfair world, Smith provides a reminder that we can use this crisis to imagine a better one' Evening Standard

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time

From the critically acclaimed author of Feel Free, Swing Time, White Teeth and many more

'There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those - the year isn't half-way done. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.'

Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.

'Zadie Smith is a marvel - her soulfulness, her sensitivity, her ability to write . . . She doesn't try to make grand statements but just leaves you with the sense that you're in the company of someone who can help you feel things deeply' Tom Hollander in the Guardian

About this title

About the Author

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. The Fraud is her first historical novel.

Date: 2013-08-06
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and the essay collection, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists. She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award among many others, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

From the Back Cover

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality-or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what it does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened-and what might come next.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241492386
• ISBN 13: 9780241492383
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96