Zadie Smith is one of those authors who is an instant buy for me. When I seen that I had been approved on Netgalley, I immediately picked this one up. It's a bit strange one to review; I am not a big reader of short story collections as I am more drawn to longer narratives, where I can be fully drawn in. This was particularly the case in Grand Union as each story is utterly different from the previous story, with different styles, themes, topics, genres and time periods. It read a bit more like a greatest hits rather than a thematically cohesive collection, so at times it did feel a bit disjointed.

Nevertheless, Smith is exception at engaging readers into the narrative no matter how brief the sojourn is. With many of the titles, I would be fully invested within a few pages. Smith's sharp soco-political and cultural commentary is on point here, and I loved her authorial voice running through the pages. I also really enjoyed how you can see the themes that have started to draw her in more through the years. Many of her characters here are in their middle years, with children and copious life experience behind them. It felt gratifying to see where she has gone since her White Teeth years.

As often comes with short story collections, however, I oscillated between loving one story and wanting to read on, and moving onto the next title and feeling a bit disappointed. For this reason, I would admit this probably is not my favourite book of hers.

Look out for Sentimental Education, For the King, and Now More Than Ever. They are fantastic.

Highly recommend this collection from an amazing talent. For the full review go to https://joebloggshere.tumblr.com/post/188040140896/grand-union-stories-by-zadie-smith-zadie-smith

Any Zadie Smith book is sure to cause a stir, and that is as true for her first short story collection as it is for any of her novels.

Grand Union held promise of searing social commentary on Western politics, and astute observances on modern life. Some stories live up to this with more abstract stories with such as The Lazy River reflecting modern life with acerbic wit, while dripping with satire. Equally there are stories that feel uncomfortably close to home, in the way we behave and relate to each other, like Sentimental Education.

However, overall the collection is a little disappointing. As a collection is lacks cohesion. Smith's best works build up and explore overarching themes, finding nuance and complexities. However, there is no sense of theme or purpose that is clear here. The stories flit between the USA and UK, to the extent that you often forget where you are, never mind the relevance it has to the story. While there are some explorations of race or class, there does not appear to be a sense of an overarching connection or point to stories. The collection at times feels more cobbled together rather than carefully collated. This would not matter if the stories were strong enough individually, but only a few are. Those that are, are not only exceptions but exceptional, and there is no denying that when Smith does it well, she does it brilliantly.

It is a difficult collection to read, requiring close attention and hard work to decipher. Often the meaning of a story will completely pass you by. It is a highly literary collection, and not as readable or accessible as some of Smith's other works. Perhaps some of the stories need rereading to more closely uncover what lays beneath it. However, on the first read, this collection left me wanting much more from it and did not live up to the precedent Smith has set by her novels.

Reading this volume of 18 short stories from Zadie Smith reminded me of doing training runs for a half marathon. Every time i finished one
I would feel pretty satisfied and proud of myself, but at the same time already dreading the next one. In other words, this volume of stories is HARD WORK, which is not to say that there is nothing to enjoy, but it certainly doesn't come easy.

In story number 15 'Blocked', Smith describes her own experiences with writer's block and states "these days i love a fragment". That's what many of these stories felt like to me - fragments - that were too cryptic or too esoteric to really enjoy and I had the constant feeling that something was going over my head. So I most enjoyed the stories which had a more traditional narrative - Big Week, for example, about a marital separation, or Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets - about an altercation in a lingerie store. I do feel that Zadie Smith is sharp and insightful as a writer, but there is more hard work than pleasure here for the reader.

I sometimes feel that a particular piece of fiction would have worked better for me had I been in a different mood, but that feeling isn’t usually as acute as it was when I was reading Zadie Smith’s recent short story collection, Grand Union. Smith’s clever writing could be totally illuminating one moment, as when she writes about the inner psyche of somebody who has come upon sudden artistic success in ‘Blocked’, and lumbering and obvious the next, as in ‘Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets’. I feel even more conflicted about this collection because it’s obvious that individual stories I instantly ‘get’ and connect to will seem pretentious and impenetrable to other readers, and vice versa. Publishers Weekly agrees with me about ‘Meet the President’ and ‘The Canker’ but not about ‘Miss Adele’. A lot of the earlier reviews here rave about ‘The Lazy River’, which I thought was a cynical and cliched take on modern life.

To an extent, I expected this mixed bag; Smith’s stories here have been collected across a number of years and seem to represent two modes of her writing. One is the bloated caricatures of White Teeth and On Beauty, which I always found too much, and the annoying literary references that ran through her book of essays, Changing My Mind; the other is the clean brilliance of her more recent work, NW and Swing Time. Occasionally these two modes sit uneasily together, as in ‘Kelso Deconstructed’, which mixes a realist story about a black man being murdered by racists with surrealist encounters with great black thinkers such as Toni Morrison. Smith is also not afraid to try out new genres, but again, the two speculative stories here are hit and miss; the fantastical parable ‘The Canker’ is probably the best fictional take on Trump I’ve read (some of the contributors to A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers could learn from this) but ‘Meet the President’, which imagines a virtual reality future, is wordy and confusing.

Trying to rate this collection was difficult; it contains both 1-star and 5-star stories. In the end, I’ve gone for 3.5 stars, because for me there were more hits than misses. Fans of Smith’s work will probably find stories here that they love, and stories that they hate; I’d be genuinely surprised if anybody adored the whole thing.

This is a book of short stories. I love Zadie Smith's novels and her writing here remains sharp and insightful and humane. I struggle with volumes of short stories because no matter how much I love an author and their work, stories are such a variable medium. You don't have the time to immerse yourself into the characters for example, so if you take a violent dislike to them on page ten, you're done by page twenty and there's no coming back. So for me, they're tricky. Some of the stories in here are magnificent. My standout favourite was the story based on the real life murder of Kelso Cochrane, which sings off the page. I finished it, read it again and am still thinking about it. Others I found harder work. There is a real mix of styles to the stories. Some are quite experimental, verging on the surreal. Some are more traditionally plotted. There are snapshots of lives and whole, complete stories in themselves. It was a really interesting read but I have to say that I prefer the novels.

I love reading short stories, and I love it when I discover a new collection of them. As a fan of Zadie Smith's earlier books, I had high expectations of this book. I was excited to receive an early preview copy from Netgalley and the Publisher.
I usually find short stories easy to dip in and out of, but I really struggled to get into this book. I left it a few days while I read a different book, and then went back to this book. Unfortunately I still found it difficult to read.
Having read Zadie's previous works I was not expecting easy and heartwarming romance. I expected more contemporary themes. To be fair, there is a good selection of themes, but I really struggled to finish this book.

Over the years, I have enjoyed some of Zadie Smith’s writing. I loved ‘On Beauty’ and remember ‘The Embassy of Cambodia’ as being a great example of short fiction. Her essays and non-fiction have been enjoyed, too. So, I was excited by her debut collection of stories.

‘Grand Union’ is a veritable banquet of short prose that offers so much. From captivating - but sad - tales, such as ‘Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets’ through to dystopian, perhaps too-close-to-reality ‘Escape From New York’, Smith shows her true mastery of the English language. She is able to switch from Downtown Manhattan to a fictional land far away almost seamlessly - definitely no mean feat. Likewise, the settings of the stories are so varied and convincing, from North London, where Smith is from, through to Manhattan - where I believe she lives.

Smith deals with issues that are, or should be, on all of our minds: racism, terrorism and world order in terms of large-scale but also relationships and life’s minutiae on a much smaller scale. Some, like ‘The Lazy River’, require quite a lot of work as the reader; others, perhaps ‘Two Men Arrive in a Village’ and ‘The Canker’, are quite primitive, almost fantastical, and set in a very different place and time. ‘For the King’ is much more present, concerning a dinner between friends in modern-day Paris.

There’s no doubt that Zadie Smith is a talented writer - she is an intelligent woman who has produced a thought-provoking collection here. For me, though, it’s too fragmented; even though variety is important, hopping from modern day New York to a more unusual setting, with an unconventional plot, is not that coherent - and jarred for me as a reader. I love short stories but I feel that some of the ones in ‘Grand Union’ try too hard - are perhaps too clever for their own good - and having finished the book, it has left me with a disjointed feeling - like there is something missing.

I really, really wanted to love this given I adore Zadie Smoth's novels generally but I am sad to say I struggled and couldn't finish. Perhaps short stories aren't my thing. To have such varied and serious subjects compacted gave me the impression there was an attempt to keep things mysterious and i felt it all a bit pretentious?! Like I said, generally i have loved Zadie Smith and her intelligence far outweighs mine, so it may be my ignorance that makes me dislike this book so much.

I was drawn to this book because of the author, Zadie Smith, whose novels I have really admired and enjoyed. This is Smith's first collection of short stories although she has had many short stories published in journals. Indeed, many of the stories in this collection have been previously published elsewhere. I realised while I was reading Grand Union that while I can and do enjoy one-off short stories I am not in the habit of reading a collection of short stories by a single author in a short time period. My appreciation of this collection was marred by reading the stories one after the other in a short time frame. I was seeking links and themes that were not necessarily there and having to make leaps in characters and plots before I had absorbed the previous story. This is certainly a critique of my reading rather than a criticism of Smith's writing and I believe I would have enjoyed more of these stories had I read them separately.
New York almost seemed to be a character in many of the stories and at times I felt as if there was too much effort on Smith's part to show a familiarity with the city. Having said that, two of the stories I found most memorable were set in the city and had a very different flavour to each other: 'Kelso Deconstructed', while set in a time past (maybe the 1960s?) resonated with today's Black Lives Matter movement. 'Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets' was an amusing but serious tale showing up multi-discriminations. I also enjoyed the very unusual 'Meet the President' which verged on science fiction and 'Lazy River', a condemnation of much contemporary tourism. I did find some stories in the collection to be unmemorable however and thought the whole book might have benefited from some judicious pruning.
My thanks to the publisher via Net Galley for a complimentary ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

Like lots of talented people who have early success, I think at best Zadie Smith is taken for granted and at worst her success (and her talent) is resented. She's a wonderful writer and there is lots here to admire. There's experimentation here but also clear engagement with a range of social and political issues, which complements Feel Free, her excellent recent book of essays. The best stories are also gripping and moving - the casual and tragic racist violence that is the centre of "Kelso Deconstructed", the vividness of the New York in "Downtown", Michael, Marlon and Elizabeth fighting for attention in "Escape from New York". The self-referential playfulness of some of the stories might not be to everyone's taste and some of the stories do not quite come off (e.g. "Two Men Arrive in a Village" sees forced in its attempt at fable, and I couldn't get on with "Blocked" at all despite reading it several times), but there is lots here to admire and even more to love.

I just didn't get on with these stories at all - there were some that were great but I didn't care for a lot of them. Being short stories I kept hoping the next one would be better but her precise and fully realised worlds are better dealt with in long form than short. I am not going to remember many of these and the best short stories stay with me.

Grand Union is Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories. She’s written loads of novels, from the more recent Swing Time to the debut and probably most well known, White Teeth. Re-reading the list of novels Zadie Smith has written, I have read all of them apart from The Autograph Man, I think.

The themes are well established – the family bonds that tie us together being more than flesh and blood, or perhaps the only ones that can tie us together are flesh and blood, which wins out against all other connections.  Morality is examined, small actions writ large on the page for the characters within.

The short stories in Grand Union explore similar themes to ones we’ve seen before. Family, history, how much your upbringing influences your opportunities, your future. I detected a bit more focus on the welfare of the planet – mentions of not/eating meat, references which may have always been in her work but I am only picking up now.

I describe myself as a fan of Smith’s work, and I remember liking the books I have read of hers. However, I don’t find them memorable, personally, so each finished book leaves me with a sense of fulfilment in completion, but a week later I couldn’t describe the plot or recall any of the character names.    I also had a look back at my other reviews, here and here, and apparently, past me did not enjoy White Teeth very much… Maybe that’s part of another theme, that of nostalgia and memories of the past contorting and changing events into something else.

So, a week or so after reading Grand Union and I am struggling to remember the stories. Flashes of them, pieces of character description come back but I couldn’t confidently lay out even one story.   Feasibly, this could be because I wasn’t paying enough attention, of course. I felt like each story was lacking in something, though – nothing really happened. I don’t mind if nothing really happens in books (and films too, I love a good old meandery Terence Malick), but in short stories there’s usually something to hang the plot from, a hook or concept.  I didn’t find that here, sadly, and actually gave up reading the last story as it was just not engaging me at all.

Basically, for fans of Zadie Smith, it’ll be great.  As for me, I have an ever increasing TBR pile which includes The Farm by Joanne Ramos and Invisible Women by Caroline Criardo Perez! What’s next on your list?

As always, thanks to Hamish Hamilton, the publishers, and Netgalley,  for providing the digital copy.

According to my Kindle, I have read 42% of this book. I don't know if the latter part of the book is stronger than the first, but it didn't really grab me. Zadie Smith is obviously an accomplished writer with a masterful grasp of the English Language, but some of the subjects she turned her mind to just slid right off my brain. I'm interested enough to pick up a novel, but this collection was not for me.

The Dialectic- The preoccupations of a single mother who is doing her level best to give her children a happy childhood after being abandoned by a husband she now secretly hates. Didn't really move the needle for me.

Sentimental Education- A lot of interesting stuff about being one of the few black people in a prestigious university. The narrator expresses a cocktail of self-doubt that she was let in to tick a box rather than because she deserved it, and resentment toward the undeservingly privileged: Leon, who lives the vision of university they put in the prospectus, complete with punting and lazy days on the common, even though he is there by dint of having a friend who lets him crash on his floor, and a large supply of e. Having said this, I thought the story was marred by the deliberately gratuitous discussion of sex- lampshaded by a rumination on how sexual language would be in a matriarchy, it felt like it detracted from the rest of the story by its inclusion here.

Lazy River- An enjoyable meditation on the complacency of modern life. I initially got the feeling that I had reading 'The Book' in the middle of 1984- that this should have been an essay, but it won me over and I appreciated the artful turns of phrase like 'the scum we have left of ourselves'

Words and Music- This story is just begging for narration. It felt like an episode of a Nightvale Presents podcast rather than a short story. Without a soundtrack, and maybe a few sound effects, I thought the version in print was something less than it could have been.

Just Right- Didn't really do anything for me. The commentary on race and class relations was interesting, but the preadolescent sexual exploration felt extraneous.

Parents' Morning Epiphany- A series of complaints about traditional narrative structure and its reductiveness. Didn't really move me one way or the other

Downtown- An enjoyable- I presume autobiographical- jaunt around New York City. Not being a New Yorker myself, a lot of references were lost on me, but I could relate to the narrator's range of emotions as Dr. Ford gave her testimony: hoping that the status quo might change, and then being a little disappointed that you let yourself believe it could.

Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets- My favourite story of the bunch. I appreciated that the world of the story was just one small incident in what seems to be a lifetime of coming up against casual, even unconscious bigotry. The shopkeeper's disbelief that he had done something to offend felt very true to life.

Whilst the short story is not my preferred type of narrative, I’m happy to read pretty much anything that Zadie Smith writes and, although uneven in impact, this collection does not disappoint. As ever, Zadie Smith’s characters are vivid and true even when they only make a brief appearance in the world of ‘Grand Union’. Whether her narrative voice is a self-conscious British holiday maker or a lonely elderly New Yorker living through memories, a busy mother looking back on her undergraduate choices or a movie-loving philosophy professor, the reader is drawn in to the immediacy of their situations.
Of all the stories ‘The Lazy River’ has to be the most topical for any British reader. Combining vivid descriptions with savage humour, Smith attacks the way in which we have drifted into dangerous complacency. Set in an all-inclusive Spanish resort, the holidaying Brexiteers and Remainers are equally lambasted. It is all the more powerful that the first-person narrator, well aware of her use of the extended metaphor, includes herself as she recognises that ‘We’re submerged, all of us’ in a soupy, chlorinated whirlpool which is mopped out at night so that the occupants do not need to acknowledge the ‘scum we have left of ourselves…’.
In the final story of the collection, the philosopher narrator communes with her dead mother as they survey the debris left by the Nottinghill carnival, after which she ‘…wandered over to the Grand Union canal which may well be that river of milk which all the daughters of the world are looking for…even though they know full well there’s no milk …’. Zadie Smith writes so well about our hopes and fears, our dreams and realities, our frailties and our resilience. Her understanding of who we’d like to be and who we become is nothing if not illuminating.
My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Books (UK) Hamish Hamilton for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

I have a confession: this was my first Zadie Smith book. Obviously I had high expectations as she is such a renowned author and I knew that her work has always been highly respected.

Her descriptions and ability to set the scene were really great, especially considering they were short stories (which I am usually not a fan of!).
As with all short stories there were certain ones that stuck out for me and I warmed to the characters a lot more in these ones. I'd be lying if I said that there weren't some stories that I really disliked - I just couldn't get in to the stories for all of them. Some of them were quite bizarre in all honesty (Blocked for example!)

I'd recommend to anyone as I was surprised that I ended up enjoying some of the stories so much; it's hard to flit between characters / stories / themes sometimes but Zadie made the transition as seamless as possible.

This collection of short stories by Zadie Smith was, overall, disappointing. Some of these stories had already been published over the years in the New Yorker, which Zadie Smith regularly contributes to, and these were actually some of my favourites in the book: “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” (an aging drag queen in New York), “Lazy River” (Brexiters on a summer holiday), and Downtown (nothing too original but reading about the hipsters of lower Manhattan and their contradictions made me smile). There are a lot of stories in this collection (19 in total), with too many different styles, genres, settings for my taste, like a series of academic exercises for a creative writing course. I much prefer when there is a bit of consistency across a collection, otherwise I feel like I’m reading one of these fancy literary magazines. That said, anything Zadie Smith writes cannot be that bad, and I still enjoyed part of the book including the London and NY settings, two cities that I have lived in or visited.

A diverse and eclectic mix of stories from Zadie Smith, some you’ll like more than others, some won’t be for you, some you’ll come back to, and some will stick in your memory.

Just from the sheer fact of reading while on holiday, ‘The Lazy River’ is the one for me – the ease of being pulled through the current of life without resistance.

I don’t often read short stories, but enjoyed most of these.

A strange and stunning collection, exploring stories of race, class, gender, politics and relationships. It's a mix - some old some new, some parts more simple, some traditional, some surreal, disjointed, perplexing... Perhaps not the ideal starting point for new readers to Smith's work, and not without its flaws, but it is altogether a valuable and kaleidoscopic work which her fans will really love.

Zadie Smith is such a GENIUS. I'm the only person I know who had never read any of her work beforehand and now I'm going to read everything she's ever written, brb.