Dead and Alive - by Zadie Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, TIME, Vanity Fair, and Kirkus Reviews - One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025

"Smart, somber . . . There's pleasure in watching a novelist wired to see all sides at once wrangle with her own dynamic subjectivity."
- The New York Times Book Review

A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays

In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.

She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to New York to reflect on the spontaneous moments that connect us. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North-West London and welcomes us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic - and the meaning of "the commons" in all our lives.

Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.

Review Quotes

"Few writers are as dazzling and versatile as Smith, whose new collection of essays, some previously published in the New Yorker, highlights the necessity of criticism at a moment when critical thinking teeters across the West and authoritarian forces are flexing their power . . . Smith asks moral questions but rarely answers them, true to the confusion of our time. With the act of reading books in worldwide decline, Smith pushes back in a cool, Joan Didion-like analysis of where we've been and where we're headed." --TIME, A Must-Read Book of the Year

"Filled with Smith's crisp observations, Dead and Alive is a smart, somber book . . . There's pleasure in watching a novelist wired to see all sides at once wrangle with her own dynamic subjectivity; what's compelling is the effort of eliciting in herself the most honest possible take. As in her previous essay collections, some of the best moments in Dead and Alive are found in her more personal and elegiac writings . . . Writing criticism--offering an opinion, putting one's skin in the game--is a form of stewardship to the commons, of showing up to that imperiled space in which Cultural Luminaries might decide to join students in speaking out against injustice, however imperfectly, because they feel an ethical imperative to do so: solidarity with speech. In Dead and Alive, Smith reminds us that this place still exists, even as its lights flicker and dim." --Megan O'Grady, The New York Times Book Review

"Eclectic in her tastes, centrifugal in her style, Smith as an essayist loves to stretch her frame." ―Financial Times

"A new collection of essays that interrogates everything from the collective hysteria of football (aka soccer) fandom--which Smith participates in but also compares to Nazism--to the bemused detachment her adolescent self felt toward adult guidance, with which she can still identify while simultaneously viewing now from the other side. That insistence on seeing people, including herself, from multiple perspectives and points in history serves her well here." --Vanity Fair, 17 Best Books of the Year

"Smith remains one of the finest critics working today, and her insights are equally prescient at grand and small scales. Her essay on Tár, a Pulitzer finalist, is a generation-defining meditation on the nascent optimism and inescapable moral compromise which befalls most youthful revolutions . . . Smith remains a categorical optimist. Though her interventions poke holes in many sacred precepts, they evince a fundamentally hopeful premise: so long as we can identify the weak spots in our moral and intellectual lives, we can remedy them. We are free to do so; this freedom is our burden. It's an audacious, existentialist notion, and it's difficult to think of another writer whose voice remains so effortlessly spry and principled in pursuit of it." --Brooklyn Rail

"It's hard to think of a living essayist who is better company on the page―walking you through her thoughts, curious about everything and everyone, including (unusually) the reader." ―Sunday Times

"Written between 2016 and 2025, these often compelling essays are divided into five sections: Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning, and Confessing. That means pieces on visual artists like Kara Walker and films like Tár, a memorial for Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel, and a new essay about technology that is one of the book's high points . . . Smith leaves room for disagreement and still maintains her high-minded humanistic ideas." --Vulture

"Smith is unsatisfied with reactive stances, whether that be in regard to the problem of consciousness or current events, and she demands that everything be broken down, examined and then reassembled. Thanks to her writing's wry humor and compassion, the breaking down of positions goes down much better than you would assume it might, and when the worldview she has tackled has been put back together, you find yourself changed. The basic fact of your stance might not be any different, but your understanding of it most certainly will be--as well as your understanding of yourself and others. This is Smith's most consequential publication in years . . . In Dead and Alive, Smith returns to essay-writing with a hammer." --BookPage

"Novelist and critic Smith brings an incisive eye and keen wit to art, music, fiction, politics, and more in this wide-ranging essay collection . . . Smith delivers original insights couched in sly, artful prose . . . Readers will be rewarded by this unforgettable collection." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Smith is a consummate and perpetual essayist. Her fourth collection contains 30 penetrating, nimble, witty, and affecting pieces, most from the past half-dozen years . . . A treasury of candid, thoughtful, caring, and exhilarating inquires." --Booklist

"Smith herself has now joined the elite tier of authors . . . She is, often, a vivid and rigorous thinker, her best pieces here radiant with curiosity, and a serious but not self-serious grappling with the terror and anxiety of modern life." --Observer

"[Dead and Alive] showcases a writer whose curiosity remains undimmed. [Zadie Smith] effortlessly transitions from art critique-focusing on Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker-to musings on politics, grief and pop culture, including reflections on the artistic drama Tár or Stormzy's Glastonbury performance." --The Mirror

"Zadie Smith once again confirms that she is among the most expert essayists of her generation. In Dead and Alive, her prose, which once animated fictional worlds in White Teeth and Swing Time, now turns its sharp observational lens toward real life--our politics, our technologies and our shared fragility. The result is an often melancholy meditation on what it means to stay human amid the noise of the digital age . . . Smith has written a generous, fiercely intelligent collection that reminds us why essays matter." --The Standard

"Zadie Smith-a great novelist, but real heads know it's non-fiction where she shines best. Her essays, with their piercing analyses and omnivorous subject matter (one throws Justin Bieber together with the philosopher Martin Buber), are some of the finest modern examples of the form. Smith's latest collection, Dead and Alive, has a great premise, combining eulogies to the dead (Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, etc) with odes to everyone and everything that's full of life." --GQ (UK), Best Books of 2025

"With essays ranging from artist Toyin Ojih Odutola to Stormzy at Glastonbury, this chocolate box of a book is ideal for dipping into when you need a cultural treat." --Good Housekeeping (UK)

"[Zadie Smith's] latest, Dead and Alive, shows how adept she is, an essay collection ranging from criticism (her take on Tár is a highlight) to obituary (Roth, Morrison, Amis) to the personal. She's never less than interesting and her capacity to rise above the noise of online discourse makes this collection enduring and surprising." --Australian Book Review, Books of the Year

About the Author

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and a play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.