Zadie Smith's Reading List

"if I have to choose only one, then it's "Lincoln in the Bardo," by George Saunders. A masterpiece."

"Ottessa Moshfegh's razor-sharp short stories "Homesick for Another World""

"I tore through two volumes of "The Arab of the Future," by Riad Sattouf -- it's the most enjoyable graphic novel I've read in a while."

"I was moved, agitated and inspired by Kathleen Collins's rediscovered "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love""

"I was moved, agitated and inspired by Hisham Matar's "The Return.""

"I've been meaning to read Dana Spiotta for years, and I'm so glad I finally did: "Innocents and Others" is terrific."

"John Berger's "Portraits" is among the greatest books on art I've ever read. I had a sort of spiritual experience with it."

"I remember it as the book that made me want to write. He was the most wonderful writer for children."

"if I want a purely pleasurable morning where I don't need to do too much, then it'll be "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," by Muriel Spark. Not a lot of teaching happens on those occasions. It's just me sighing with happiness."

"if I want a purely pleasurable morning where I don't need to do too much, then it'll be "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," by Muriel Spark, or "An Experiment in Love," by Hilary Mantel. Not a lot of teaching happens on those occasions. It's just me sighing with happiness."

"I was assigned "Mythologies" and "A Lover's Discourse," by Roland Barthes, and felt at once that something momentous had happened to me, that I had met a writer who had changed my course in life somehow."

"I was assigned "Mythologies" and "A Lover's Discourse," by Roland Barthes, and felt at once that something momentous had happened to me, that I had met a writer who had changed my course in life somehow."

"This novella is explicitly a book about ridicule and caricature—Professor Pnin is a joke of a man on a college campus. He’s an awkward Russian émigré with bad English, false teeth, a clumsy sense of humor, a tendency to burst into tears or take offense at small slights. Everybody on campus can do an impression of him. He’s a clown. But at the core of the book is the idea that there is a Pnin who is as real as the people who ridicule him. You are invited to laugh at him, and then you are humbl..."

"All of Larkin delights me, but this is a good book to start with. Larkin didn’t have great range, but the area he chose is so important it doesn’t matter. His deal is making you understand that death is a total and permanent annihilation. Not the nicest news a poet can give you, but still worth knowing. He likes you to believe that the thought of death prompts nothing else in him but despair. That’s not entirely true. Larkin was scared of infinity, but he was also capable of making infinity b..."

"Wallace is not for everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is ‘the evil that men do.’ I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don’t know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don’t have the guts to admit that I do. Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them. Reading Wallace for the first time was also about the hideous revelation of a talent a lot bigger than mine. You can ta..."

"This is a deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly. Hurston is a lyrical writer, and lyricism is not usually my cup of tea, but there are talents that go beyond genre and taste. Her greatest claim over me is that she never was ashamed of the novel as a form—she believed in the transformative power of storytelling, and she took risks with..."

"A work of genius. But more important—and from a purely selfish point of view—a woman wrote it. That might seem ridiculous to male writers, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius. He’s got too many examples on his side of the fence. Eliot was the first woman I read who could go toe-to-toe with, say, Tolstoy. I was 15. Since then, I’ve learned how many grand achievements in the novel have been female, but when I was a teenager, that was news to me."