A novelist at heart, Smith writes essays that scarcely abide by the current understanding of the form. She doesn’t buttonhole her reader with fervent arguments and rarely brandishes a suitable object for blame. And while one of the pieces in Intimations concerns suffering, Smith seems allergic to the notion of testifying to her own in any detail. She’s ambivalent, sometimes rueful, often self-deprecating. Her first inclination is to laugh at herself.

I think this collection of little pieces by Zadie Smith will endure as a beautiful thing. Although it’s born out of the pandemic and the lockdown, it feels like a doorway into a new space for thought.

... ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness.

Smith’s slim volume is a balm during an anxious year. We have learned the meaning of essential, and Smith’s prose is correspondingly stripped down. Clear. Precise. Orderly. Though her accomplishment is making her point plain without being obvious, the literary equivalent of the Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With, which depicts 6-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by federal marshals. You miss the racist graffiti scrawled on the wall behind her on first glance, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. No, I won’t spoil Smith’s brilliance for you, but it’s right there in the first piece, Peonies.

Smith...is a spectacular essayist—even better, I’d say, than as a novelist.

Ms. Smith gives form to our experience of 2020.

Zadie Smith is bringing the anxiety of quarantine firmly into the literary fold.

... a brief but scenic route through the author’s brain.

Fortunately Smith is as deft an essayist as she is a novelist. Her new collection of meditations on this peculiar time of liberty and captivity beguiles with its meticulous thought patterns, alluring felicities and rhapsodic turns of phrase.

Smith’s sensitivity to the difficulties raised by her project are articulated with thoughtfulness and a concerted absence of grandiosity.

... slim and polished.

There’s nothing here to quibble with. I understand why editors at our leading magazines would turn to our most gifted artists to weigh in on everything that’s happening. But clarity or fresh insight on a still-unfolding catastrophe is a tall order. It’s a relief that punchy turns of phrase and scathing oversimplification—the dominant modes of most contemporary chatter—are not of interest to Smith. But Intimations doesn’t argue much. It’s an echo of the reader’s internal monologue, the stuff you probably already think bouncing back at you, improved by Smith’s prose. Smith is a good student of people.

Intimations is the third and slimmest of her essay collections, at 100 pages, but its psychic heft is substantial.

There’s something endearingly old-fashioned about her resolve not to be rushed. These are not flashy hot takes for social media, but slow, thoughtful reflections.

... six short, beautifully structured essays written largely in her characteristically gleaming prose.

The pieces vary in tone.

... another example of the high-quality work a talented artist is capable of producing during this difficult time.

It is a rare pleasure to watch a writer at the top of her game extract from the bewildering moment we are living through, truths that most of us are too overwhelmed to articulate or even to see.

Though each piece offers an interesting take on our new normal, the collection feels a little too sparse. There’s a noticeable narrative arc missing in a lot of the material here that leaves the reader wondering, what should I do with this information?.

Smith dulls the immense force of the pandemic with her sharp-edged, searching prose ...Begun at the start of lockdown in the United States and finished days after George Floyd’s murder, Intimations , Smith’s third essay collection, breezes by at under 100 pages, perfect for our roving and scattered attentions. The six essays are crisp and vaguely personal, avoiding definitive conclusions for quieter moments of introspection and wonder. For Smith, cooped up at home with her family and confronted with the reality of filling time, writing provides a raft through stormy currents, her way of eking out a semblance of narrative during our moment of destabilizing upheavals.

... the novelist writing these essays, this year, spends most of her time with portraiture, turning something she’s once described as 'a source of daily pleasure' — other people’s faces — into the basis for the ethical argument that anchors this book and perhaps our moment..

... compelling.

Rueful, angry, deftly-crafted and potent responses to ominous times.

... [an] incisive and insightful collection.