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Orit Gat
Orit Gat is a writer living in London. She is a contributing editor of The White Review.


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On Marriage, Netflix, and Other Things I Hate

Book Review

June 2023

Orit Gat

Book Review

June 2023

1. ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband.’   Marriage falls into a...

Book Review

July 2022

It’s Personal: Writing and Reading Through Grief

Orit Gat

Book Review

July 2022

1. A spill  I’m drinking coffee in bed and reading The Reactor. I feel so close to everything Nick...

Zadie Smith’s biography is one of contemporary writing’s fondest and most famous yarns of precocious and meteoric literary success As a student at Cambridge she writes White Teeth (2000), an ebullient, epically proportioned novel about multicultural London It gets picked up by Hamish Hamilton, and on the strength of eighty manuscript pages a two-book, six-figure deal is struck before she’s even graduated Rapturous praise and a glut of awards follow Millennium hangovers have scarcely subsided and Smith is already being hailed as the ‘voice of a “new England”’ It is a perfect literary storm   All this would be enough to turn anyone’s head, but Smith, very wisely, kept hers down Two more novels – The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty (2005) – arrived in quick succession She spent the next seven years establishing herself as an essayist and cultural critic of notable range and sensitivity, writing pieces for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, The New York Times and the Sunday Telegraph – many of which are collected in the volume Changing My Mind (2009) As a literary critic her roving mind and resolutely un-buttoned-up enthusiasm for fiction in all its forms have significantly enriched some of Brit Lit Crit’s otherwise tediously dogmatic debates about what novels should be like and what it is that they do For a while Smith spoke of herself as a ‘recovering novelist’, but before long returned to writing fiction – and to her old stomping ground, Willesden – with her most recent novel, NW (2012)   Our conversation took place over email during June and July of this year When we began, Smith was busy teaching fiction-writing workshops in Paris, but these days she is generally to be found in New York, where she has been Professor of Creative Writing at NYU since 2010 In our correspondence, she reminded me very much of the authorial presence sometimes glimpsed in her novels: affable, modest and wise Her responses to my questions were thoughtful and precise, and ranged widely over topics including the nature of literary innovation, Hollywood musicals, her move to the

Contributor

August 2014

Orit Gat

Contributor

August 2014

Orit Gat is a writer living in London. She is a contributing editor of The White Review.

Essay

September 2020

Three Finals

Orit Gat

Essay

September 2020

1998   In the summer of 2006, at a bar off Odéon, a girl I didn’t know drew a...

Anna Wiener’s ‘Uncanny Valley’

Book Review

February 2020

Orit Gat

Book Review

February 2020

1. SF vs NY   Anna Wiener found herself in the right place at the right time. That is, if that was what she...
James Bridle’s ‘New Dark Age’

Book Review

October 2018

Orit Gat

Book Review

October 2018

Halfway through James Bridle’s foreboding, at times terrifying, but ultimately motivating account of our technological present, he recounts a scene from a magazine article...
Women and Technology: History is a Cautionary Tale

Book Review

April 2018

Orit Gat

Book Review

April 2018

Few book reviews open with amateur rap, but: ‘back in the day when new media was new,’ goes the first line of a song...
Scroll, Skim, Stare

feature

Issue No. 16

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 16

1.   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples. It includes no examples because its subject – artists’ websites, their...
What Can an Art Magazine Be?

feature

Issue No. 10

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 10

What can an art magazine be? Today, as the publishing industry reassesses its role in the age of the internet, the pioneering art magazine Metronome provides...

READ NEXT

feature

February 2011

Old media, new year: China’s CCTV woos the nation’s netizens

Shepherd Laughlin

feature

February 2011

The CCTV New Year’s gala broadcast, known in Mandarin as Chunwan, is probably the most massive media event you’ve...

Interview

February 2013

Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum

Charlie Fox

Interview

February 2013

Perhaps what’s gathered here is not an interview at all. Precisely what it is, we’ll think about in a...

fiction

May 2012

Hunt for American Heiress Continues...

Seraphina Madsen

fiction

May 2012

Hunt for American Heiress Continues With Bizarre Manuscript Found in Cave in Altamira By ALICE SHIFT 7:00 AM ET...

 

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