Feel Free
Zadie Smith
Penguin Publishing Group
<span>Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to </span><span>The New Yorker </span><span>and the </span><span>New York Review of Books</span><span> on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.</span><span><br><br></span><span>Arranged into five sections - In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free - this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network, and Facebook itself, really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."</span>