It was just two months ago that Zadie Smith cancelled all her interviews after her ill-chosen remarks about England created a stir back home, leaving literary podcast The Bat Segundo Show in the lurch. But she seemed to break that silence for the Associated Press, and now a trip through Google News indicates that she was chatting with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer soon after that. The reason it occurs to me to mention this now is that today's Washington Post is running yet another Zadie-chat that actually, based on internal clues, took place on September 28...in other words, two weeks after her publicist told Bat Segundo producer Edward Champion that Zadie had stopped talking to the media. The funniest bit? "'My mother says I'm the worst interview in the world!'" she moans at one point, dropping her head into her hands."

So what's the deal—did this retreat into media seclusion only ever apply to the blogosphere? If Smith shut everybody out and then had a change of heart, perhaps induced by a straight talk from a publicist, it's interesting that her people never bothered calling to reschedule the Bat Segundo interview. But the turn of events suits Champion just fine. "I'm literally drowning in interviews right now," he says. "And I only have the time to do one of these a week." Well, usually just one; the current episode is a doubleheader featuring poet Lizzie Skurnick and novelist Wendy Lesser.

photo: Bill O'Leary/WaPo