Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith may never be satisfied with herself, said Kate Dwyer in Marie Claire. The London-born novelist has been productive and universally celebrated for nearly two decades, since her debut, White Teeth, was published when she was just 24. But past accomplishments are little help whenever she sits down to start something new.

In a long recent essay in The New York Review of Books, she describes “the continual risk of wrongness, word by word, sentence by sentence,” and she apparently lives that anxiety. “The possibility of writing a bad book is continually present for everybody, all the time,” she says. “You start from scratch every time.”

With Grand Union, her new book, Smith has compiled a collection of short stories for the first time, said Allison Ward in The Columbus Dispatch. Eleven of the tales are new, and the diversity of settings and characters seems to suit her current state of mind. “My heart is about variety,” she says. “I want readers to confront different ways of looking at things.” In her essay, a defense of fiction’s presumptions in an age when many critics are questioning writers’ right to imagine their way into the minds of others, she presents her own self-questioning habits of mind as essential to the trade. Fiction, she argues, has always rejected the idea that a person can be known just through surface attributes. But she also concedes that a new generation, including the college students she teaches in New York, might not need the insights fiction once provided. “I have this uncertain feeling about what a writer is; they’re very certain,” she says. “I remember being certain at that age.”