Glimpses of a divided kingdom in zadie smith’s short stories of the 2010s

Abstract

Zadie Smith is one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent writers and one of its most prolific public intellectuals. This chapter argues that Smith’s short fiction performs a similar function of social observation and commentary as her journalistic writing. The chapter considers Smith’s attitude towards the short story form, and then explores how Smith uses the short story to model thinking about the Dis-united Kingdom of the 2010s. It focuses on three stories originally published in the New Yorker: “The Embassy of Cambodia”, “Meet the President” (both 2013) and “The Lazy River” (2017).