“Talking to yourself can be useful,” writes Zadie Smith in the introduction to Intimations, her new book of essays reflecting on the early days of the shutdown. She is joined in conversation by Ashley C. Ford, author and host of the Chronicles of Now podcast. “This collection will endure as a beautiful thing,” wrote Tessa Hadley. “Although it’s born out of the pandemic and the lockdown, it feels like a doorway into a new space for thought. Zadie Smith writes as she thinks, and she thinks crisply and exactly, not in abstractions, but through the thick specificity of people and places, fragments of story. The movement of her writing feels like the zigzag passage of perception inside a quick mind, not in love with its own opinions, uneasy with certainty.” Copies of Intimations can be purchased from http://www.bookshop.org