Zadie Smith on Totalitarian Nightmares

Sponsored by Classical Pursuits

Zadie Smith
The Dream of the Raised Arm

In early Thirties Germany, as the Nazi threat grew, the state’s propaganda machine began to penetrate the dream life of its citizenry. What of our dreams today, under the influence of the algorithms? And what will come with the return of Donald Trump?

Ben Tarnoff, Zephyr Teachout, Bill McKibben, Michael Hofmann, Linda Greenhouse, and Garry Wills
The Return of Trump

On losers, fear, the Supreme Court, the end of the FDR era, antisystemic times, and words without consequences.

Clair Wills
A Mind Cast Out

The New Zealand writer Janet Frame insisted on the distinction between her fiction and her autobiography, yet it was the fiction that crystallized her own isolation in psychiatric wards.

Tim Parks
Hawthorne’s Mood Swings

Just as he was given to periods of melancholy and cheer, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories offer a constant back-and-forth between light and dark, town and wilderness, loneliness and society.

The Room

a poem by
Emily Berry

It was rare that I would walk down a street and look in through a window and want to be inside the room I saw there, I mean live in it, because other people’s furnishings and lighting arrangements disturbed me deeply, but on one occasion I did like what I saw, I liked it so much and found it so comforting and familiar that I was sure I must at one time have actually lived in this room, despite all evidence to the contrary…

Free from the Archives

In the Review today Zadie Smith writes about the incursion of technologies of propaganda into our conscious and unconscious lives. Eight years ago she wrote about the possibilities of multiculturalism and the “ahistorical and naive” people who fight against them.

Zadie Smith
On Optimism and Despair

“When I wrote a novel about the London I grew up in, I further did not realize that by describing an environment in which people from different places lived relatively peaceably side by side, I was “championing” a situation that was in fact on trial and whose conditions could suddenly be revoked. This is all to say I was very innocent, aged twenty-one.”

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