The Center for Fiction Presents Zadie Smith on The Fraud with Vinson Cunningham

Monday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT September 16, 2024

The Center for Fiction

Auditorium seating is sold out. Register above for Overflow Seating to enjoy a livestream of the event projected on a large screen in our Members Lounge. The overflow audience will have first access to the book-signing line following the event.

The Center for Fiction is thrilled to welcome acclaimed novelist Zadie Smith to celebrate the paperback launch of her latest novel, The Fraud, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction depicting the legal trial that divided Victorian England. Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved new arrival to London finds himself as the star witness against a purported heir to a sizeable estate and title—and realizes his future depends on telling the right story. The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of “other people.” The New Yorker staff writer Vinson Cunningham (Great Expectations) will join Smith in conversation. Smith will sign books after the event.

Featuring

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

Photo Credit: Ben Bailey-Smith
Vinson Cunningham

Vinson Cunningham

Vinson Cunningham joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016. Since 2018, he has served as a critic for the magazine, writing about theatre, television, and more. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2024, and was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2021-2022. And, in 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his Profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and is a co-host of Critics at Large, The New Yorker’s weekly podcast about culture and the arts. His début novel, Great Expectations, came out in 2024.

Featured Book

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The Fraud

By Zadie Smith

Published by Penguin Publishing Group

PURCHASE

In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as the star witness. Watching the proceedings, and with her own story to tell, is Eliza Touchet—cousin, housekeeper, and perhaps more to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.

From literary London to Jamaica’s sugarcane plantations, Zadie Smith weaves an enthralling story linking the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved, and the comic and the tragic.