Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
The introduction to Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays has Zadie Smith explaining that the book was written quite accidentally while she was suffering from writer's block while penning a novel. To take her mind off her book, and continue working and flexing her writer muscles, she worked on short assignments, penning book introductions, giving lectures, and even writing movie reviews. The book is her collected (and edited) efforts of those years.
Organized into thematic sections (like Reading, Being, Writing, etc), the book has a little something for everyone. For the writers there are book intros that delve into the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Nabokov, Eliot, Kakfa, Barack Obama and (in one overly long and acadamic work) David Foster Wallace. There are personal essays that examine Smith's childhood, especially her relationship with her (now deceased) father that pay tribute to him and the influence he had on her work. There are personal tributes to Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo and (my personal favourite) an entire section of movie reviews penned for the Guardian where Smith went to see the most popular popcorn fare and was baffled at the results. The witty way in which she eviscerates these movies is wonderful to read even if you have only the vaguest inclination of what they're about.
It's a good book to pick up and leaf through and hopefully Smith will one day collect and publish the essays and material she's written since Changing My Mind.