Zadie’s own clothing, shoes, and accessories (worn throughout).
Zadie Smith and Dev HynesGrapple With the Eternal “Why”
This past August, two weeks before the release of her sixth novel, The Fraud, Zadie Smith could be found in her home in northwest London, trying to connect to Zoom to chat with her friend, the musician Dev Hynes. Smith is one of our few living novelists who doesn’t need a stream of adjectives or a list of accomplishments to remind a reader of their worth. She’s simply one of the most brilliant and dynamic minds at work in our messy, highly confused and confusing present. Her new novel, The Fraud, set in Victorian-era London, involves the spinster cousin of a popular writer who becomes increasingly obsessed with the trial of a man claiming to be the long lost inheritor of an aristocratic estate. Here, she and Hynes discuss the power of music, middle age injuries, rights and cultural revolutions, and what the best literature can and can’t do.