Changing My Mind
Occasional Essays
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Narrated by:
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Barbara Rosenblat
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By:
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Zadie Smith
About this listen
Split into five sections - Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering - Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians, and Italian divas. Whether writing on Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or Zora Neale Hurston, she brings deft care to the art of criticism with a style both sympathetic and insightful. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny - a gift to readers and writers both.
©2009 Zadie Smith (P)2009 PenguinListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Smith writes with a beguiling mix of assurance and solemnity, borrowing her vocabulary from many intellectual and cultural sources... Smith’s native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can’t help hoping she’ll change her mind yet again.” (The New York Times Book Review)
"Smith brings her novelist’s gifts - an eye for detail, a languid turn of phrase - to the essay form.” (The Boston Globe)
"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." (Los Angeles Times)
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Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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Great history of both Rand and her era
- By Mark on 08-07-10
By: Anne C. Heller
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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My Life with Bob
- Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
- By: Pamela Paul
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for 28 years - carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk - reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul's Book of Books, a journal that records every book she's ever read.
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An uncanny mirror and a celebration of book love
- By Cherilyn Parsons on 07-28-19
By: Pamela Paul
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
- A Life of David Foster Wallace
- By: D. T. Max
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.
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Max avoids hagiography or a sycophant's biography
- By Darwin8u on 06-11-13
By: D. T. Max
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Story
- Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
- By: Robert McKee
- Narrated by: Robert McKee
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Abridged
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Robert McKee's screenwriting workshops have earned him an international reputation for inspiring novices, refining works in progress, and putting major screenwriting careers back on track. Quincy Jones, Diane Keaton, Gloria Steinem, Julia Roberts, John Cleese, and David Bowie are just a few of his celebrity alumni. Writers, producers, development executives, and agents all flock to his lecture series, praising it as a mesmerizing and intense learning experience.
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Only 5 Chapters
- By Stephen Buck on 02-15-11
By: Robert McKee
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Manhood for Amateurs
- The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Michael Chabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as a father, Chabon's memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.
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Terrible
- By Ken on 10-14-09
By: Michael Chabon
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Salinger
- By: David Shields, Shane Salerno
- Narrated by: Peter Friedman, January LaVoy, Robert Petkoff, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, listeners will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.
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Ingenious novel or biography? Hard to tell....
- By Melinda on 09-05-13
By: David Shields, and others
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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So We Read On
- How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures
- By: Maureen Corrigan
- Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.
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Reading Gatsby as an adult reveals its greatness!
- By Mark on 10-06-14
By: Maureen Corrigan
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great material, thoroughly brilliant narration
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Very disappointing
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Enthralling and instructive. A novel of the highest caliber
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What listeners say about Changing My Mind
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-18-20
There may be truths on the side of life
"There may be truths on the side of life."
- Saul Bellow, quoted in Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind
I love Zadie Smith. But not in any of the Greek formal ways. I love her in multiple ways, spilling over each other. I love her brain. I love her prose. I love how closely she reads. I love how different her perspectives are to mine and how similar AT THE SAME TIME. She reminds me why I love writing, movies, Nabokov, DFW, family and why I need to love all these things and more -- better. She began these essays with an essay about Zora Neal Hurston that bounced around the idea of her loving ZNH as only a black woman can and she ended these essays with a lengthy tribute to DFW and his collection of stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. She showed me how, even with reading almost all of DFW, I'm still a novice. That my reading skills lack and that Zadie Smith, is also (as cliched and ironic as this sounds in a post-Obama, Brexit/Trump era) almost post-racial (not really, but she is larger than most categories people would want to shove her into.
This collection is broken into the following sections:
READING
1. Their Eyes Were Watching God: What does Soulful Mean? - ✶✶✶✶✶
2. E.M. Forster, Middle Manager - ✶✶✶✶✶
3. Middlemarch and Everybody - ✶✶✶✶
4. Rereading Barthes and Nabokov - ✶✶✶✶✶
5. F. Kafka, Everyman - ✶✶✶✶
6. Two Directions for the Novel - ✶✶✶✶✶
BEING
7. That Crafty Feeling - ✶✶✶✶✶
8. One Week in Liberia - ✶✶✶
9. Speaking in Tongues - ✶✶✶✶✶
SEEING
10. Hepburn and Garbo - ✶✶✶✶✶
11. Notes on Visconti's Bellissima - ✶✶✶
12. At the Multiplex - ✶✶✶✶✶
13. Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend - ✶✶✶
FEELING
14. Smith Family Christmas - ✶✶✶✶✶
15. Accidental Hero - ✶✶✶✶✶
16. Dead Man Laughing - ✶✶✶✶
REMEMBERING
17. Brief Interviews iwthh Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of DFW - ✶✶✶✶✶
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- Matt Miller
- 11-26-18
my first audio book
this was the first audio book I've listened to and it was a good one. I likes the essay format become I didn't have to keep track of a story and could pause it when I needed to and easily remover where I was in a few minutes because it wasn't a large story. I loved the reader, she has a great voice, it is clear and articulate, she really brings the charm of the writing.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-12-16
bland and nutritious
I could barely finish except when Smith inserted her personal experience. brilliant literary criticism was lost in a bored narrator's drone.
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