I'm Christopher Leiden, this is open source.

Zadie Smith is a writer who matters.

20 years now after quite teeth, her breakthrough novel,

when she was just out of college,

her new one is titled The Fraud,

fiction that pops in and out of two centuries.

You can feel very Victorian,

and it can feel very 2023.

Fraud's trials disbelief, abounding.

Welcome back, Zadie Smith.

I think of you now as the current title holder

in the glorious old lineage of English and American fiction.

I feel you looking both forward and backward

and sideways in this new novel

about your professional family over the generations,

your literary ancestors, and your cousins in the game today.

It can feel confessional at one moment,

comical the next, stone serious before you're done.

Founders of the Victorian novel turn up in The Fraud,

Bakery, Dickens, George Elliott.

At the same time, you're addressing the extended family

of readers and writers today.

...