Zadie Smith on Politics, Turning Fifty, and Mind Control

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A new novel by Zadia Smith isn't just a book, it's a real event, and everyone who cares about fiction reads it and talks about it. That's been true since her very first novel, White Teeth.

From page one of that book you heard a new voice, a bold and original voice, and a twenty fifth anniversary edition of White Teeth just came out this year. It's a classic by now, which seems astonishing to say. But if you only know Zadie Smith as a novelist, you're actually Kind of missing out because she also writes some of the very, very best essays out there. She thinks with enormous nuance about the way we live now and how to read, about literature, technology, gentrification, politics, is really not a topic that wouldn't benefit from her insight.

Zadie Smith's new book gathers some of those essays from the New Yorker and elsewhere in a collection called Dead and Alive. This year marks the 25th anniversary of of White Teeth. And, you know, some novelists, they begin with kind of some warm-up books, some imitative books, and then they find their stride and they become themselves. White Teeth was this blazing white-hot debut. And somewhere along the line in in in this book, you you indicate that you don't completely recognize this 80 Smith that is behind White Teeth.

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