For Your Reading List

photo Zadie Smith / Intimations book cover

Credit: Janette Pellegrini / Getty Images; Penguin Books

It’s a testament to the profound temporal strangeness of 2020 that the first few months of lockdown already feel like ancient history — a snapshot from another era, when people seemed mostly united, for a brief moment, in doing whatever it took to defeat the virus.

For the folks fortunate enough to work from home during those chilly spring months, we baked bread, watched comfort TV, and — in Zadie Smith’s case — wrote a book of essays.

Out on July 28, Intimations contains six essays about those early weeks in lockdown.

“What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed,” writes Smith in her foreward.

By Smith’s own admission, this is a minor work — “small by definition, short by necessity” — but there’s still pleasure to be had in reading this collection, especially if you’re a fan of Smith’s elegant, incisive prose. She’s at her best when she’s writing honestly and drolly about her own inner contradictions and intersecting privileges.

In her essay “Something to Do” she blithely dismisses the incipient need artists have to justify why they make art: “There is no great difference between a novel and banana bread,” while acknowledging that the most powerful art “is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself.”

In the essays “Screengrabs,” “A Woman With a Little Dog” and “A Young Hovering Man,” she writes thoughtful, empathetic snapshots of people she interacts with occasionally — an elderly neighbor, the guy who gives her a chair massage at the nail parlor, the young IT guy at the university where she works who likes to use a hoverboard.

She falters a bit, when she attempts to take on weightier subject matter. The peculiarly titled “Suffering Like Mel Gibson,” feels tonally weird, especially in light of the recent resurfacing of Gibson’s antisemitism and racism. Likewise, her essay on George Floyd and the British politician Dominic Raab, “Postscript: Contempt As a Virus,” doesn’t fully congeal; her take on American race relations often seems both naive and curiously dispassionate.

Still, at just over 100 pages, reading Intimations is a largely agreeable way to spend a rainy afternoon. Get your copy now. —Tomi Obaro

BuzzFeed Book Club:

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The BuzzFeed Book Club is excited to announce Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half as its August pick, The best-selling novel follows identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella after they've run away from their small Southern hometown in 1968 and their lives diverge. The novel spans decades, following the sisters’ daughters as their own stories intertwine, in a captivating, expansive, and insightful story about family, race, gender, and identity. Sign up to read along — and get a taste of the first chapter below.

The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort. The barely awake customers clamored around him, ten or so, although more would lie and say that they’d been there too, if only to pretend that this once, they’d witnessed something truly exciting. In that little farm town, nothing surprising ever happened, not since the Vignes twins had disappeared. But that morning in April 1968, on his way to work, Lou spotted Desiree Vignes walking along Partridge Road, carrying a small leather suitcase. She looked exactly the same as when she’d left at sixteen — still light, her skin the color of sand barely wet. Her hipless body reminding him of a branch caught in a strong breeze. She was hurrying, her head bent, and — Lou paused here, a bit of a showman— she was holding the hand of a girl, seven or eight, and black as tar.

“Blueblack,” he said. “Like she flown direct from Africa.”

Lou’s Egg House splintered into a dozen different conversations. The line cook wondered if it had been Desiree after all, since Lou was turning sixty in May and still too vain to wear his eyeglasses. The waitress said that it had to be — even a blind man could spot a Vignes girl and it certainly couldn’t have been that other one. The diners, abandoning grits and eggs on the counter, didn’t care about that Vignes foolishness — who on earth was the dark child? Could she possibly be Desiree’s?

“Well, who else’s could it be?” Lou said. He grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser, dabbing his damp forehead.

“Maybe it’s an orphan that got took in.”

“I just don’t see how nothin that black coulda come out Desiree.”

“Desiree seem like the type to take in no orphan to you?”

Of course she didn’t. She was a selfish girl. If they remembered anything about Desiree, it was that and most didn’t recall much more. The twins had been gone fourteen years, nearly as long as anyone had ever known them. Vanished from bed after the Founder’s Day dance, while their mother slept right down the hall. One morning, the twins crowded in front of their bathroom mirror, four identical girls fussing with their hair. The next, the bed was empty, the covers pulled back like any other day, taut when Stella made it, crumpled when Desiree did. The town spent all morning searching for them, calling their names through the woods, wondering stupidly if they had been taken. Their disappearance seemed as sudden as the rapture, all of Mallard the sinners left behind.

Naturally, the truth was neither sinister nor mystical; the twins soon surfaced in New Orleans, selfish girls running from responsibility. They wouldn’t stay away long. City living would tire them out. They’d run out of money and gall and come sniffling back to their mother’s porch. But they never returned again. Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find. [Keep reading.]