by David Gura

Zadie Smith
KATJA LENZ/AFP/Getty Images

Novelist — and reluctant lecturer — Zadie Smith.

Thanks to Hendrik Hertzberg, of The New Yorker magazine, I found this essay, by novelist Zadie Smith, published in The New York Review of Books. It's drawn from a lecture she gave at The New York Public Library, called "Speaking in Tongues," which she says is more like "an orchestra of many voices."

It's wide-ranging and wonderful and too-difficult for me to describe. Read it or listen to it, and tell me what you think.

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