Zadie Smith is one of Britain's most critically acclaimed young novelists. Her award-winning debut White Teeth was made into a four part BBC miniseries and On Beauty, her most recent, won the Orange Prize for Women Writers. Smith’s unique family history — born of a Jamaican mother and English father with a 20 year age difference — leaves her uniquely placed to explore the intersections of race and class in post-Thatcher England.

Changing My Mind is a collection of essays and articles for different publications and audiences. The title comes from a wonderful piece of equivocation on Smith's part, as many of these pieces find her reflecting and changing previously held views on a variety of topics, including an elegy for fellow writer David Foster Wallace and a lengthy piece on her father and his role in the Second World War (an act that helped form the basis for White Teeth).

Some of these articles, such as her tongue-in-cheek movie reviews commisioned by outlets including The Guardian and The New York Times, show Smith fooling around and having fun. The main attraction though, are her essays on other authors, particularly Zora Neale Hurston, E.M. Forster and Franz Kafka, in addition to the more challenging piece on David Foster Wallace. In describing her first encounter with Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Smith discusses how her initial reaction to the work mirrored her development as a reader and later as a writer. As a young girl she rejected the book for being overly sentimental. Her piece on E.M. Forster frames his various vaccilations as an attempt to bridge both ends of early 20th century English readership. But it is her exploration of Nabakov and Barthes — on the role of the reader and the death of the author — where she ultimately states that the purpose of the author and of writing as a creative act is for "changing my mind" as a reader. Her thoughts dart back-and-forth between the modern authoritative style of Nabakov and the empowerment of the reader advocated by Barthes, while discussing her own writing process.

To a certain extent, Smith's novels draw on her personal history, but Changing My Mind charts some of her own personal passions, such as her love of Katherine Hepburn and the oddball comedy of Fawlty Towers. It's also fun to read authors riffing on their peers and influences, but it's a real pleasure when Smith abandons English lit to relive her youthful emotional response to Alan Moore's graphic novel, V for Vendetta, or to reluctantly enthuse about Get Rich Or Die Tryin' hurting her brain while warming her heart. In some respects, Smith's blending of literary and pop culture follows territory established by Nick Hornby, but Changing My Mind sees Smith making it her own.