She’s Everywhere

Zadie Smith has a new story in next week’s New Yorker, titled “Hanwell in Hell.”

I spent just one night with your father, in Bristol, thirty-four years ago. He was down on his luck at the time, as was I. We had both suffered dramatic reversals of fortune and recognized immediately that we had failure in common a rare example of masculine intuition. Each sniffed out the other’s catastrophe.

Read it here. You can also read Smith’s much linked-to introduction to the centenary edition of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.