How much joy can a person tolerate? How many kinds of boredom make up a life? Who owns the story of black America? Should Justin Bieber be more like Socrates? And why is there a dead art collector floating in the swimming pool? Zadie Smith is back with a second collection of essays. From German Old Masters to the new masters of East Coast rap, from social networks opening lines of communication to national referenda closing doors, she reaches out in all directions and draws back a rich feast of ideas. Here pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment: dissected with razor-sharp intellect, set brilliantly against the context of the utterly contemporary, and considered with a deep humanity and compassion. With the easy intimacy of a local and the piercing clarity of an outsider, she casts a sharp critical eye over the creative luminaries that have shaped our world: from J. G. Ballard to Karl Ove Knausgaard, Orson Welles to Charlie Kaufman, Joni Mitchell to Beyonce, and far beyond. And it considers the points of contact where the author herself meets this world, where the political meets the personal and critique meets memoir. Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. Zadie Smith is a professor of fiction at New York University. "British novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Zadie Smith was born in the north-west London borough of Brent to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller."--From wikipedia.org website.

In the world. Northwest London blues ; Elegy for a country's seasons ; Fences : a Brexit diary ; On optimism and despair -- In the audience. Generation why? ; The house that Hova built ; Brother from another mother ; Some notes on attunement ; Window on the will : Anomalisa ; Dance lessons for writers -- In the gallery. Killing Orson Welles at midnight ; Flaming June ; "Crazy they call me" : on looking at Jerry Dantzic's photos of Billie Holiday ; Alte Frau by Balthasar Denner ; Mark Bradford's Niagara ; A bird of few words : narrative mysteries in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye ; The tattered ruins of the map : on Sarah Sze's Centrifuge ; Getting in and out -- On the bookshelf. Crash by J. G. Ballard ; The Buddha of suburbia by Hanif Kureishi ; Notes on NW ; The Harper's columns ; The I who is not me -- Feel free. Life-writing ; The bathroom ; Man versus corpse ; Meet Justin Bieber! ; Love in the gardens ; The shadow of ideas ; Find your beach ; Joy.