In Dead and Alive, her prose, which once animated fictional worlds in White Teeth and Swing Time, now turns its sharp observational lens toward real life — our politics, our technologies and our shared fragility. The result is an often melancholy meditation on what it means to stay human amid the noise of the digital age.
This collection spans art, culture and personal memory. She jumps from eulogies for Joan Didion and Martin Amis to a vivid film review of Tár, which earned her a Pulitzer nomination, and reflections on artists such as Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker.
Uniting them is her gift for finding emotional resonance in unlikely places: a subway car of phone-gazing passengers, a Glastonbury crowd. In Some Notes on Mediated Time she laments how digital life “makes the public private, and the private public,” crystallising her central concern: the erosion of collective experiences. Elsewhere, in Fascinated to Presume: In Defence of Fiction, she argues that empathy, not identity, is the foundation of good writing. Her writing remains as ever engaging, but now tempered by the reality of living through a time defined by political fracture, environmental anxiety, and algorithmic isolation.
Most of the essays in Dead and Alive have been published elsewhere; one is the text of a talk given to creative writing students. It has remarkable range — from personal confession to cultural critique — yet every essay feels connected by an insistence on the importance of being kind. Even when she writes about death, disillusionment, or the absurdity of fame, “Protect your consciousness,” she advises, and this book feels like an act of protection in itself — an argument for stillness, attention, and moral imagination in a distracted world.
Smith has written a generous, fiercely intelligent collection that reminds us why essays matter. They keep us awake, alive, and, in Smith’s words, “just human enough to hope”.
Oliver Poole is Executive Editor of The London Standard
Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith is out now (Hamish Hamilton, £22)
