Intimations

"the novelist writing these essays, this year, spends most of her time with portraiture, turning something she's once described as 'a source of daily pleasure' — other people's faces — into the basis for the ethical argument that anchors this book and perhaps our moment."

"Smith is at her perceptive and precise best in this slim but thematically weighty volume of personal and civil reckoning."

"The book's leanness feels like part of its aesthetic; its thought-space is uncluttered and unfussy, and everything is lightly, delicately done ..."

"But clarity or fresh insight on a still-unfolding catastrophe is a tall order."

"The most compelling observations in Postscript: Contempt As a Virus bring us back to the acute uneasiness of the present moment as reflected in behaviors by British prime minister Boris Johnson's senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, who violated shelter-in-place orders in Great Britain, and also the brutality of Floyd's murder ..."

"an incisive collection ..."

"She's ambivalent, sometimes rueful, often self-deprecating."

"In Zadie Smith's universe—meaning, for my money, the one we're all living in—complexity is king."

"We have learned the meaning of essential, and Smith's prose is correspondingly stripped down."