Zadie Smith wrote a collection of essays during lockdown

Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, Swing Time, and On Beauty has spent her lockdown writing a full collection of essays.

The collection is a reflection of time spent in lockdown and will be named Intimations.

Penguin Random House has announced that Smith’s Intimations was written months ago during the early stages of lockdown. The full collection will be published for the 28th of July 2020. The six brand new essays will delve into “ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation.”

The synopsis, written by Smith, reads:

“There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those. What I’ve tried to do is organise some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are, above all, personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.”

According to Zadie Smith the collection named Intimations was inspired by her early-quarantine read of Marcus Aurelis’s Meditations.

“I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book, but I did come out with two invaluable intimations,” she explained. “Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”

Publishing company Penguin Random House released this statement:

“Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality—or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what it does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened—and what should come next.”