Keith Miller
Transatlantic Tales
Grand Union
By Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton 245pp £20
When Zadie Smith, scourge of lyrical realism (and reluctant standard bearer for its hysterical cousin), transatlantic femme de lettres and quite literally the last word in 21st-century lit, brings out a short-story collection nearly twenty years into the game, a reasonable question to begin with is: why now? We are told of a prelapsarian time when writers began their careers by publishing such books: if the reviews were okay, they might get a novel; if that did all right, a couple more; and so on it went. Despite there being plenty of talk at the moment about the short story being a form that’s somehow uniquely suited to our fragmented, time-poor, device-juggling lives, it seems not to be something significant numbers of people will pay to read – or, better maybe, that significant numbers of writers are likely to be asked to produce. In fact, it could be that you’ve got to be where Smith is – some good sales, a few gongs, an NYU professorship and several short stories already published in the New Yorker and elsewhere – for it to be viable.
However, Grand Union doesn’t quite have the flavour of a mid-career retrospective, though Smith’s many strengths are everywhere visible in it. It’s more like the boîtes-en-valise Marcel Duchamp used to make – little leather cases containing miniature copies of his best-known works – or an even more venerable
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Don't ask about the dress code, don't talk about your spouse too much, flirt with everyone
Andrew Martin on the rules, pleasures and pitfalls of living in Paris
Andrew Martin - Bobos versus Beaufs
Andrew Martin: Bobos versus Beaufs - Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century by Simon Kuper
literaryreview.co.uk
for the latest edition of @Lit_Review I worked on some excellent pieces – @MortenHoiJensen on Kafka
@ellafox_m on @mimpathy (Honor Levy)
@profrhodrilewis on Shakespeare novels
@edcumming on Kaliane Bradley
@zoeguttenplan on @NationalTheatre's Dickens show
wrote about MY FIRST BOOK (@GrantaBooks) for @Lit_Review, a book that I think makes difficult things look very easy: