Book Riot Podcast: "What We Want from Essays: DEAD & ALIVE by Zadie Smith"

Date: November 5, 2025
Hosts: Jeff O’Neill & Rebecca Schinsky

Overview

In this episode, Jeff O’Neill and Rebecca Schinsky dive into Zadie Smith’s new essay collection, Dead & Alive. They discuss what makes a great literary essay, Smith’s particular approach to nonfiction, and the collection’s most impactful pieces. Together, Jeff and Rebecca unpack how Smith’s essays create intellectual space for nuance, uncertainty, and the messiness of consciousness in contrast to the Internet’s take-driven culture. Discussion covers the role of literary essays today, the responsibilities (or freedoms) of fiction, and how Smith’s personal style models a rich, contemplative form of public thought.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nature of Literary Essays and What We Want from Them

• Essays as Invitations:
  • Smith’s essays are not about persuading but about showing her thinking process—interrogating her own consciousness.
  • “She’s after clarity and she’s after a demonstration of like hers is clearly a mind at work… And I think in that is an inherent invitation to the rest of us to think about what our own minds are working on.” (Rebecca, 03:26)
• Resisting Certainty and The 'Take' Economy:
  • Smith stands apart from the online “dunk” and take-driven culture by embracing nuance, uncertainty, and reconsideration.
  • “There is no invective here. There is no boogeyman, there is no name calling, there’s no dunking... It is very much for something rather than against something.” (Jeff, 08:54)
• Essays as Trials/Arenas of Thought:
  • Referencing Montaigne, essays are attempts—provisional, process-focused, and exploratory, not declarations of doctrine.

2. Zadie Smith’s Approach: Sensibility, Nuance, and the Invitation to Complexity

• Specificity & Peculiarity:
  • Smith's focus on singularity and detail is “the atomic unit of her care.”
  • “If you’re interested in specificity and peculiar, you’re going to by extension be nuanced because that’s the only way to do it.” (Jeff, 12:04)
• Accessibility of Essays:
  • Smith offers readers freedom of movement—skip around, drop in anywhere—making the collection approachable.
  • “[Smith] reinforces this idea that readers have absolute freedom of movement in an essay collection, that you can skip. You can skip essays. You can move around. You can close the book anytime you want.” (Rebecca, 13:47)

3. Fiction, Authenticity, and Unruliness

• In Defense of Fiction:

  • Smith’s landmark essay, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” addresses contemporary pressures on fiction to be “authentic” and “relatable.”

    “Novels are machines for falsely generating belief, and they succeed or fail on that basis. So you should not need to relate to a work of fiction for it to be good.”
    — Rebecca (quoting Smith, 23:27)

  • She argues for fiction’s power as a space for imaginative play, not identity verification.

• Fiction as Resistance to Algorithmic Narrowing:
  • Unlike social algorithms, books challenge: “A book does not watch us reading. It cannot morph itself page by page to suit our tastes or to deliver us only depictions of people we already know and among whom we feel comfortable…” (Rebecca, 27:40)
  • The capacity for fiction to offer unruly, unfamiliar, even uncomfortable experiences is celebrated as freedom.

4. Smith’s Personal Practice: Model of Public Thinking

• Privacy and Scarcity as Resistance:
  • Smith offers only glimpses of personal detail, modeling intellectual boundaries and resisting the culture of constant sharing.
  • “Most of what we know of her is just what she chooses to share with us about how she thinks about things… I think it is also a form of resistance to Internet and algorithm…” (Rebecca, 42:23)
• Aging, Mediation, and the Human Condition:

  • The essay “Notes on Mediated Time” resonates for its treatment of aging, technological mediation, and mortality.

    “We thought our lives would be reasonably paced and tell a story full of meaning. Instead, it’s just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions except the certainty of death…”
    — Rebecca (quoting Smith, 35:07)

  • Smith considers how experience is filtered—via Internet, books, life stages—and what it’s like to live without neat answers.

5. Community, Connection, and Complexity

• Practicing What She Preaches:
  • Smith’s essays about friends and rivals (e.g., Martin Amis, Philip Roth), despite political or personal differences, demonstrate the possibility of community without enforced sameness.
  • “There’s deep appreciation for individuals for their work, for the complexities alongside acknowledgement that they did not agree about everything.” (Rebecca, 10:23)
• Moral Intelligence and Mature Conversation:
  • Smith exemplifies “moral intelligence”—the capacity to think deeply and act with consideration, which the hosts see as an ideal for public intellectuals.
  • “All I know is that to get through the next four years we will need all the moral intelligence we can muster.” (Rebecca, 46:27 quoting Smith)

6. Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Smith’s Media Habits:
  • Zadie Smith writes without a smartphone and only accesses WhatsApp via her laptop, suggesting deliberate minimization of algorithmic influence (Rebecca, 35:05).
• On Scarcity of Personal Detail:
  • “It is titillating when she’s like, ‘I once bummed a cigarette off Joan Didion, and I didn’t know who Joan Didion was.’ And you’re like, what?!” (Rebecca, 42:23)
• On Literary Effect:
  • “A good essay collection, a good book like this… makes you want to read stuff and watch stuff and look at stuff and engage with ideas that you don’t normally or wouldn’t seek out on your own. It is…the very best kind of invitation. And, like, this is the party I want to go to.” (Rebecca, 50:36)

Timestamps for Notable Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:36 | Introduction to Zadie Smith’s Dead & Alive | | 03:26 | What we want from literary essays | | 08:54 | Smith’s aversion to certainty and the ‘take’ economy | | 13:47 | Discussion of the essay collection’s structure and accessibility| | 23:27 | “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” + quote | | 27:40 | Books vs. algorithmic consumption | | 35:05 | “Notes on Mediated Time” and Smith’s approach to mediation/tech| | 42:23 | Smith’s personal privacy as resistance to algorithm | | 46:27 | Moral intelligence in Smith’s essays (quote) | | 50:36 | The invitation to intellectual curiosity through essay |

Notable Quotes

• On the essay’s purpose:

  “She’s after clarity and she’s after a demonstration of like hers is clearly a mind at work… And I think in that is an inherent invitation to the rest of us to think about what our own minds are working on.”
  — Rebecca (03:26)

• On certainty and nuance:

  “There is no invective here... It is very much for something rather than against something.”
  — Jeff (08:54)

• On fiction and authenticity:

  “Novels are machines for falsely generating belief, and they succeed or fail on that basis. So you should not need to relate to a work of fiction for it to be good.”
  — Rebecca (quoting Smith, 23:27)

• On book’s resistance to algorithmic culture:

  “A book does not watch us reading. It cannot morph itself page by page to suit our tastes or to deliver us only depictions of people we already know and among whom we feel comfortable…”
  — Rebecca (27:40)

• On mediation and mortality:

  “…Our lives would be reasonably paced and tell a story full of meaning. Instead, it’s just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions except the certainty of death…”
  — Rebecca (quoting Smith, 35:07)

• On moral intelligence:

  “All I know is that to get through the next four years we will need all the moral intelligence we can muster.”
  — Rebecca (quoting Smith, 46:27)

Takeaways

• Zadie Smith’s Dead & Alive advances a literary essay style that opposes the flattening, certainty-driven pressures of algorithmic culture, making space for challenging thought, ambiguity, and empathy.
• The hosts praise Smith for both the quality of her prose and her integrity as a thinker—she models a public intellectual life that is rigorous, nuanced, and generous.
• The episode is itself an invitation to treat reading, and essay-reading in particular, as a space for complex, open engagement—with art, with others, and with oneself.

For Listeners

Anyone interested in what essays can do, in the value of literary thought unmediated by digital platforms, or in Zadie Smith’s particular genius will find much resonance in this rich, inviting episode.