 Cover of first edition | |
| Author | Zadie Smith |
|---|---|
| Audio read by | Doc Brown [1] Zadie Smith [1] |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton |
Publication date | 3 October 2019 [2] |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 978-0-241-33702-8 |
| 823/.914 | |
| LC Class | PR6069.M59 A6 2019 |
Grand Union: Stories is a 2019 short story collection by Zadie Smith. It was published on 3 October 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. [3] [4]
Grand Union contains nineteen short stories. Eleven of the stories are new and unpublished and eight were originally published in The New Yorker , The Paris Review , or Granta . [2] [5] [6] [7]
| Title | Originally published in |
|---|---|
| "The Dialectic" | — |
| "Sentimental Education" | — |
| "The Lazy River" | 18 and 25 December 2017 issue of The New Yorker |
| "Words and Music" | — |
| "Just Right" | Spring 2013 issue of Granta |
| "Parents' Morning Epiphany" | — |
| "Downtown" | — |
| "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets" | Spring 2014 issue of The Paris Review |
| "Mood" | — |
| "Escape from New York" | 8 and 15 June 2015 issue of The New Yorker |
| "Big Week" | Summer 2014 issue of The Paris Review |
| "Meet the President!" | 12 and 19 August 2013 issue of The New Yorker |
| "Two Men Arrive in a Village" | 6 and 13 June 2016 issue of The New Yorker |
| "Kelso Deconstructed" | — |
| "Blocked" | — |
| "The Canker" | — |
| "For the King" | — |
| "Now More Than Ever" | 23 July 2018 issue of The New Yorker |
| "Grand Union" | — |
Upon release, Grand Union received generally positive reviews. According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on 44 critic reviews with 17 being "rave" and 17 being "positive" and nine being "mixed" and one being "pan". [8] In Books in the Media, a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a rating of 3.62 out of 5, based on 16 critic reviews. [9] In the January/February 2020 issue of Bookmarks , a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a rating of 3.0 out of 5 based on critic reviews with a critical summary saying, "Smith's first short fiction collection showcases the ample strengths--elegant writing, compelling characters, quirky plots--that have earned her novels many accolades". [10] [11] [12] On BookBrowse , the book received a rating of 5 out of 5 stars for its "Critics' Consensus", assessing 5-star reviews from Entertainment Weekly , New York Post , Oprah Magazine , Washington Post , Booklist , Kirkus Reviews , and Publishers Weekly , a 4-star review from The New York Times and 3-star review from The Guardian . [13]
Publishers Weekly called the collection "smart and bewitching" and said, "Smith exercises her range without losing her wry, slightly cynical humor. Readers of all tastes will find something memorable in this collection." [5]
Kirkus Reviews said, "Several of Smith's stories are on their ways to becoming classics." [6]
David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "Smith is at her finest" in Grand Union and praised the collection's "balance between humor and self-laceration." [14]
Writing for Literary Hub, author John Freeman called Smith "one of our finest short story writers" and said, "The compression and swiftness of these tales are opposite skills to the ones Smith has plied in her five, wondrously different novels. Yet to watch these tales unfold is to feel a gladness that only virtuosity—and emotional depth—can ignite." [15]
Alice O'Keeffe, writing for The Bookseller , said, "The first ever collection of short stories from the wonderful Zadie Smith is surely a must-read for her many fans." [16]
Writing for The New York Times Book Review , author Rebecca Makkai wrote, "While the collection might not coalesce as a unit, it contains some of Smith's most vibrant, original fiction, the kind of writing she'll surely be known for." [17]
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Tod Goldberg is an American author and journalist best known for his novels Gangsters Don't Die (Counterpoint), Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), Gangsterland (Counterpoint) and Living Dead Girl, the popular Burn Notice series (Penguin/NAL) and the short story collection The Low Desert: Gangster Stories (Counterpoint).
On Beauty is a 2005 novel by British author Zadie Smith, loosely based on Howards End by E. M. Forster. The story follows the lives of a mixed-race British/American family living in the United States, addresses ethnic and cultural differences in both the USA and the UK, as well as the nature of beauty, and the clash between liberal and conservative academic values. It takes its title from an essay by Elaine Scarry—"On Beauty and Being Just". The Observer described the novel as a "transatlantic comic saga".
Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short-story writer.
The Sympathizer is the 2015 debut novel by Vietnamese-American professor and writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is a best-selling novel, and recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel received generally positive acclaim from critics. It was named on more than 30 best book of the year lists and a New York Times Editor's Choice.
Swing Time is a novel by British writer Zadie Smith, released in November 2016. The story takes place in London, New York and West Africa, and focuses on two girls who can tap dance, alluding to Smith's childhood love of tap dancing.
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between is a memoir by Hisham Matar that was first published in June 2016. The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize, becoming the first nonfiction book to do so.
There There is the debut novel by Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange. Published in 2018, the book follows a large cast of Native Americans living in the Oakland, California area and contains several essays on Native American history and identity. The characters struggle with a wide array of challenges, ranging from depression and alcoholism, to unemployment, fetal alcohol syndrome, and the challenges of living with an "ambiguously nonwhite" ethnic identity in the United States. All of the characters unite at a community powwow and its attempted robbery.
Feel Free: Essays is a 2018 book of essays by Zadie Smith. It was published on 8 February 2018 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. It has been described as "thoroughly resplendent" by Maria Popova, who writes: "Smith applies her formidable mind in language to subjects as varied as music, the connection between dancing and writing, climate change, Brexit, the nature of joy, and the confusions of personhood in the age of social media."
Quichotte is a 2019 novel by Salman Rushdie. It is his fourteenth novel, published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes's classic novel Don Quixote, Quichotte is a metafiction that tells the story of an addled Indian-American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become obsessed.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is the debut novel by Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong, published by Penguin Press on June 4, 2019. An epistolary novel, it is written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother. It was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories is a 2018 short story collection by Denis Johnson. It was published posthumously on January 16, 2018, by Random House. It consists of five short stories, three of which were previously published in The New Yorker and Playboy. Johnson finished the collection a few weeks before his death in May 2017.
The Great Believers is a historical fiction novel by Rebecca Makkai, published June 4, 2018 by Penguin Books.
Intimations is a 2020 collection of essays by writer Zadie Smith. Smith began writing the book around the time the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, and completed it soon after the murder of George Floyd.
Harlem Shuffle is a 2021 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is the follow-up to Whitehead's 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is a work of crime fiction and a family saga that takes place in Harlem between 1959 and 1964. It was published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021.
Spring is a 2019 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton. It was long-listed for the Orwell Prize (2020).
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, established in 2005, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism. Between 1983 and 2004, the award was presented jointly with biography.
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, established in 1975, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.
Morgan Talty (Penobscot) is a writer and an assistant professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine in Orono.
The Fraud is a historical novel based on the Tichborne case written by Zadie Smith and published by Penguin in 2023.
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