Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith (1975 - ) was born in northwest London and grew up in circumstances common and unsurprising, nothing remarkable, nothing unusual, nothing foreshadowing the explosion she made on the literary scene when she was 18. That year an uncompleted manuscript of a novel was seized upon the London publishing world and auctioned for the privilege of publishing it. The novel, White Teeth, became the sensation of the decade. Smith has gone to fulfill and expand that promise.
Besides White Teeth, she is the author of the novels The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, and two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Crash
Crash
The Definitive Cult, Postmodern Novel—a Shocking Blend of Violence, Transgression, and Eroticism
Reissued with a New Introduction from Zadie Smith
When J. G. Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of autoerotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash—a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant, and iconic celebrity.
First published in 1973, Crash remains one of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.