The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.by Zadie Smith
Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life, perhaps six, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.
by Zadie Smith
My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in reruns and on video. We knew the “Dead Parrot” sketch by heart. We had the usual religious feeling for “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent.
By Zadie Smith
How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation - there are only nine years between us - but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception.
By Zadie Smith
If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin. It may come in postcard form or as a valentine, as a framed print for your birthday or repeated many times across wrapping paper, but it will come.
by Zadie Smith
What I have to say about craft extends no further than my own experience, which is what it is - 12 years and three novels. Although this lecture will be divided into ten short sections meant to mark the various stages in the writing of a novel, what they most accurately describe, in truth, is the writing of my novels.
by Zadie Smith
Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I…
By Zadie Smith
Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place - this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port.
