Books: Open City, Every Day is for the Thief, Known and Strange Things, Bl The manner in which African conflicts and misery are viewed from without is a subject that rightfully provokes ire and irritation. The book's first section shines a bright lens on the work of literary giants such Baldwin, Transtromer, Walcott, Naipaul, and Sebald. [He] explores a vast expanse of territory—zigzagging through art history, literature, poetry, music, painting, politics, violence and race in America.”, A New York Times Notable Book • One of the ten top novels of the year —Time and NPR, NAMED A BEST BOOK ON MORE THAN TWENTY END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTS, INCLUDING The New Yorker • The Atlantic • The Economist • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The New Republic • New York Daily News • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Minneapolis Star Tribune • GQ • Salon • Slate • New York magazine • The Week • The Kansas City Star • Kirkus Reviews. This is an extraordinary novel, a radiant meditation on the nature of happiness and faith, corruption, misfortune and belonging.”—San Francisco Chronicle, “Shimmering . ‘We are creatures of private conventions,’ he writes. Africans are generally not expected to be experts on non-African subjects. . That it was his first book is a marvel.”—The A.V. Open City, Teju Cole's début novel, is a strangely wonderful perambulatory reading experience: insightful, lyrical, decidedly modern and politically prescient. With concern, compassion, and vast insight and intelligence, Teju Cole's essays engage a wide range of subjects. Opposite a shot of scaffolding, ladders and shadows – all favourite motifs – on the island of Bali, he writes a sort-of manifesto for the method of this book. Book Reviews 'Thief' Delivers An Unfiltered Depiction Of Life In Lagos. 920 talking about this. . “An indelible novel. The places he can go, you feel, are just about limitless.”—The New York Times, “Crisp, affecting . Cole is a novelist and essayist. The same can be said for the social and critical commentary by award-winning novelist Cole…Cole’s insights cast fresh light on even the most quotidian of objects…[and his] collection performs an important service by elevating public discourse in an unsettled time.”, “To categorize Cole as an “essayist” or “social commentator” would be to diminish the remarkable range of his oeuvre. Teju Cole might just be a W. G. Sebald for the twenty-first century.”, —Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector, “Open City has traces of Mrs Dalloway, touches of Dave Eggers, but it’s 100% Teju Cole. This collection of essays previously published in the New Yorker and elsewhere is no disappointment. 393 pp. Club, “A Teju Cole novel is a reading experience matched by few contemporary writers.”—Flavorwire, “Omnivorous and mesmerizing . We are perennially other people’s subjects, never the anthropologists, and when we show that we can return the gaze with equal intensity, that we can also glory in expertise that goes beyond the innate knowledge of our own worlds, the response is often similar to Naipaul’s: “He’s very good, he speaks so well, he speaks well.”. Readers are certain to find a personal favourite: I loved Always Returning, an affecting meditation on the death of WG Sebald in which Cole wanders through the cemetery of St Andrew’s in Framingham Earl, Norfolk, looking for Sebald’s grave and trying, at the same time, to have a coherent conversation about his pilgrimage with Jason, the taxi driver who got him there. . . Teju Cole's book is exquisitely written, descriptive and imaginative: brilliant in many ways. Optimism regarding the future of [Nigeria] pulsates steadily . Every Day Is for the Thief is as much as an epic journey into the heart of the traveler as the place traveled.”—The Seattle Times, “Every Day Is for the Thief is a wonderful meditation on modern African life that will help cement Cole’s reputation as a prose stylist. Languages Inhabited: Teju Cole's Favourite Albums Teju Cole , August 24th, 2016 09:28 Following the publication of his first collection of essays, Known And Strange Things, the writer and photographer pens us his own Baker's Dozen, picking "as many kinds of albums that really mattered to me as possible" . . So I am grateful that Cole has quietly and calmly asserted his right to write in the key most harmonious to him, and to do so at the deepest level. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. 9 people found this helpful. Teju Cole. It gathers its power inexorably, page by page, and ultimately reveals itself as nothing less than a searing tour de force. —San Francisco Chronicle, “[Cole] ranges over his interests with voracious keenness, laser-sharp prose, an open heart and a clear eye… These essays demonstrate the transformative power of communion with gifted and committed master craftsmen and women who have given, and continue to give, the very best of themselves, and thus raise their achievement from the merely competent to the sublime.” Writer and photographer. . Top critical review. The American-Nigerian writer floats free of the usual cultural expectations in this eclectic, laser-sharp collection of essays. But, remarkably, the book avoids any of the chunkiness that usually accompanies such work. So let me state upfront that Teju Cole and I have the same publisher, Faber, who have put out his new essay collection, Known and Strange Things, an appropriate and beautiful title, taken from a poem by Seamus Heaney, for a book that will be deservedly lauded. All critical reviews › Redhill Technologies. BLIND SPOT by Teju Cole photographed by Teju Cole Quickview . Publishing can be a cliquish and incestuous business; it is not uncommon for writers from the same agencies and publishers to review each other. (July 2019) NYR DAILY Carrying a Single Life: On Literature and Translation July 5, 2019. But I wonder whether those brutalised by Kony would have the same concerns as Cole. . Open City (2011) won the PEN/Hemingway Award, rave reviews from The New Yorker and The Guardian, and praise from literary vanguards like Colm Tóibín, James Wood, and Claire Messud. Blindspot by Vijay Iyer and Teju Cole review – evoking an ugly America The Met is hosting composer Vijay Iyer and collaborators in its new space – and on Sunday, as the audience discussed the violence at the Trump rally, his work with writer Teju Cole seemed to sum up the fearful mood Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria.He is the author of Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City,which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. But don't look for plot or straight forward narration. Teju Cole is a photographer, a photography critic for the New York Times, an art historian and a critically acclaimed author. For four years, he wrote a monthly column for the New York Times Magazine as their photography critic. But it also points to ways in which ‘culture’… by Teju Cole ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2011 A masterful command of narrative voice distinguishes a debut novel that requires patience and rewards it. In addition to writing fiction, he is a photographer, critic, and curator. Wearing a dark, beautifully-cut suit, as usual. widely praised as one of the best fictional depictions of Africa in recent memory.”—The New Yorker, “Every Day Is for the Thief is unapologetically a novel of ideas: a diagnosis of the systemic corruption in Cole’s native Lagos and of corruption’s psychological effects. The Lagos presented here … Known and Strange Things is published by Faber (£17.99). . Are the Chibok girls as deeply concerned with how their “Africa” is viewed in the west, or would they rather just be free? Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975) is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian.. Cole is the author of a novella, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007); a novel, Open City (2012); an essay collection, Known and Strange Things (2016), and a photobook, Punto d'Ombra (2016); published in … . The soft, exquisite rhythms of its prose, the display of sensibility, the lucid intelligence, make it a novel to savour and treasure.”, —Colm Tóibín, author of The Master and Brooklyn, “The pages of Open City unfold with the tempo of a profound, contemplative walk through layers of histories and their posthumous excavations. 3.0 out of 5 stars Ive read about 1/3, Here, it strikes a particularly jarring note. Teju Cole’s Open City follows the peripatetic ramblings of its narrator through the streets of New York City. 6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. He is standing there as though listening to something. Read as a whole, it shows that Cole has fulfilled the dazzling promise of his novels Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City. My mother taught French. In Memoriam Okwui Enwezor.) His world of the strange and the known is open to everyone: the only passport required is curiosity. The house of literature [Cole] is busy creating is an in-between space with fluid dimensions, resisting entrenchment.”—The Christian Science Monitor, “Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Critics have been scrabbling for superlatives and reaching for comparisons with authors of real weight: Sebald and Coetzee are only the most stellar. I particularly admire the sure-footed negotiation Cole makes as he defies the conventions placed on writers of colour associated with the more temperate climes, swerving deftly away from the deadening expectations of “representation” and “authenticity”. But even in this world of riches there are occasional discordant notes. But even without this connection, Cole is still one of about 20 contemporary writers of whom I can say I have read just about every published word. Paper, $17. ‘But we are also looking for ways to enlarge our coasts.’ This collection provides a way.”, “Cole is a literary performance artist, his words meticulously chosen and deployed with elegance and force. Open City by Teju Cole – review A novel about spatial relations, it is also effective at dramatising the relationship between objective and subjective experience Illustration by Clifford Harper The best first novel of 2011.”, “Intelligent and panoramic…engaged with the world in a rare and refreshing way.”, “Open City is a meditation on history and culture, identity and solitude. As a photographer, Teju Cole has a penchant for the scuffed and distressed surfaces, materials and tools that form rectilinear patterns on construction sites. His most recent book, co-authored with the photographer Fazal Sheikh, is Human Archipelago. He ranges over his interests with voracious keenness, laser-sharp prose, an open heart and a clear eye. —The Guardian, “ There’s almost no subject Cole can’t come at from a startling angle.” Cole affirms his right to be taken seriously on any subject to which he chooses to direct his searching attention. (In Memoriam Bisi Silva. Worry about that. I had the pleasure of reading Portrait of a Lady, Cole’s all too brief essay on Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, just before I attended a Keïta retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Like the novelist, protagonist Julius is a Nigerian immigrant living in Manhattan. . There is such richness in these essays that it is not possible, in this short space, to do justice to all their delights. . His subjects are diverse and disparate. Cole nicely blends his … Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Photo credit: Teju Cole. “The world belongs to Cole and is thornily and gloriously allied with his curiosity and his personhood…History—literary, political, social or personal—offers us a vast archive of knowledge that both influences and challenges the definitions we construct for ourselves. it is a pleasure to be in [the narrator’s] company.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “Beautifully written . Strewn throughout the work are a set of pieces that sit simultaneously within and apart from the rest of the book. He says nothing but, finally, he takes off his jacket. He captures life’s urgent banality, and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects glimmer darkly in the interstices.”, —Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books, “The most thoughtful and provocative debut I’ve read in a long time. . . And as with the writers Rebecca Solnit and Daniel Mendelsohn, in Teju Cole's company your mind is somehow both expanded and calmed. Imaginative, original, experimental, and sensual, this book revisits the way narrative is constructed with tenderness and style.”—Chris Abani, author of Graceland, “[Cole] revels in ambiguity, taking inspiration from authors who have toyed with what a novel can be, like W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and V. S. Naipaul. This is not just returning the gaze: it is throwing a poison-tipped javelin in the eye of the beholder. Taking his cues from W. G. Sebald, John Berger, and Bruce Chatwin, Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.”—The New York Times Book Review, “Remarkable . I have long been uneasy with Cole’s famed essay on the “white saviour industrial complex”. . Cole is also a professional photographer and one could easily imagine photographs inserted into the text, à la W.G. Teju Cole's book is exquisitely written, descriptive and imaginative: brilliant in many ways. The ball here is an allusion to La Rochefoucauld, to which Naipaul responds with barely veiled condescension: “He’s very good, he speaks so well, he speaks well.”. Fernweh is Teju Cole’s latest book published on MACK. Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things (Faber and Faber, 2016) by Rachel Sykes. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion. To get too close to the people you admire can so often disappoint. Open City by Teju Cole: review Thomas Marks on Open City by Teju Cole, an astonishing debut novel about uncertainty and New York. This insightful collection of essays demonstrates Cole’s formidable knowledge and the wide range of his interests and passions. Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. But it is self-evident that the biggest problem in many African countries is not the white gaze, however irritating, but, to paraphrase Soyinka, the black foot in the black boot that steps over so many of its own citizens. a luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . “I do not love the travel pages,” he, somewhat superfluously, declares. “A Teju Cole novel is a reading experience matched by few contemporary writers.”—Flavorwire “Omnivorous and mesmerizing . . A brilliant collection. Cole has a way of superimposing emotional landscapes over his portraits of physical places that is transcendent. —The New York Times Book Review, “In this dazzlingly wide-ranging collection, [Cole] draws an insightful map of literal and metaphoric inter-connections.” . . I also loved the essay in which he gives thoughtful attention to VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. . The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.”—Billy Collins, “Rich imagery and sharp prose . Click here to order a copy for £14.75, The American-Nigerian writer floats free of the usual cultural expectations in this eclectic, laser-sharp collection of essays, 'New York problems': literature puts a city on the couch. In Teju Cole’s Open City, Julius, a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist living in New York, wanders the city. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole’s charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The ideas make the character and vice versa.”—The New Republic, “Every Day Is for the Thief is a testament to [Nigeria’s] power to inspire.”—Vanity Fair, “Excellently crafted . However despite it's numerous successes the overall novel feels a bit like an attempt. . Drawn together these essays amount to what Kevin Young calls in The Grey Album, a 'removed shadow book. The interplay between the externals of conversations with Jason and the deep interiority of Cole’s response to seeing Sebald’s grave is masterfully written, with Cole straining to act as a mediator between the worlds inhabited by these two very different men. Teju Cole is Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. Cole is a novelist and essayist. Random House. ‘Sure-footed’: Teju Cole in Rome, June 2016. ublishing can be a cliquish and incestuous business; it is not uncommon for writers from the same agencies and publishers to review each other. . it is a pleasure to be in [the narrator’s] company.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Beautifully written . For Julius, “the walks [meet] a need: they [are] a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work….Every decision—where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought…—[is] inconsequential, and [is] for that reason a reminder of freedom.” And there were surreal moments in Natives on the Boat, in which Cole meets Naipaul at a dinner party and, “ever the eager student”, puppyishly places a ball at the feet of the “wily old master”. He has asserted the right to write on Brahms and Kofi Awoonor, Derek Walcott and Tomas Tranströmer, Sebald and Wole Soyinka, Wangechi Mutu and Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Malick Sidibé and Krzysztof Kieslowski. . Sebald. Cole is also a professional photographer and one could easily imagine photographs inserted into the text, à la W.G. -- Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012. There’s a great look of concentration on his face. O. shows up in my dream last night. So let me state upfront that. Teju Cole, the Fall 2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Writers House, is the author of five books. 'Open City' is Teju Cole's first novel, and it sets a standard that will be hard to keep up. A remarkably resonant feat of prose.”, “A clear-eyed and mysterious achievement, a modern meditation that is both complex and utterly simple…In the precision with which Mr Cole chooses words or phrases he is not unlike Gustave Flaubert.”, “A complicated portrait of a narrator whose silences speak as loudly as his words—all articulated in an effortlessly elegant prose…Teju Cole has achieved, in this book, a rare balance. To read, see, and travel with him is to be changed by the questions that challenge him.”, “Picture a kaleidoscope: each shining component is a small jewel for sure, but taken together, they form a stunning picture that can be viewed from myriad dazzling angles. KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS Essays By Teju Cole Illustrated. Last modified on Thu 22 Mar 2018 00.00 GMT. The essays demonstrate the transformative power of communion with gifted and committed master craftsmen and women who have given, and continue to give, the very best of themselves, and thus raise their achievement from the merely competent to the sublime. I dipped in and out of the essay again as I moved around, often welling up at the grace and playful dignity of Keïta’s subjects – his women with elaborate hairstyles and headdresses, with bare feet and hands calloused from overwork; and his achingly affectionate portraits of the strutting young men, newly made civil servants posing with stereos, plastic flowers, reading glasses and the same motor car in every picture, all symbols of their aspiration for modernity. In a world where Gauguin is feted for his Tahitian subjects, Andre Magnin is a leading expert on African art, and squadrons of western international civil servants are trained at Ivy League universities to become experts in something called “African Studies”, the same assumptions, and indeed courtesies, are not extended the other way. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it.”, “Magnificent and shattering. —The Boston Globe, “Essays that call to mind what Walter Benjamin did in his Illuminations: taking cultural works and applying them critically and politically to the now…The hope that Cole infuses in his prose is mirrored with poetically entrancing sentences…A bold, honest, and controversially necessary read.”, “Again and again in this gathering of more than forty pieces, [Teju] Cole demonstrates an appealing blend of erudition and affability—a quality that makes him unique as an essayist…An understated and lyrical stylist, Cole combines the rigor of a critic with the curiosity of Everyman. Does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders…A compassionate and masterly work.”, “Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original…What moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing. The unnamed walker of Every Day moves with urgency, and does so in a cityscape that threatens to slide, avalanche-like, into violence.”—The Boston Globe, “[Every Day Is for the Thief] expands and reinforces the accomplishments of Open City, confirming along the way that Teju is one of the foremost—for the lack of a better term—bicultural writers.”—Aleksandar Hemon, Bomb, “Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can’t go home again; but that doesn’t mean you’re not free to try. . By Thomas Marks 21 August 2011 • 23:20 pm Watching with strangers while reading Cole was like being with a perfect companion. Go with the flow of the walks, and you get carried by their rhythms. . 1. through [Every Day Is for the Thief].”—The Huffington Post, “Every Day Is for the Thief is an amazing hybrid of a book. For the author of a critically lauded debut novel, Teju Cole is winningly reluctant to publish fiction. This is not, of course, to say that there is nothing to criticise in the self-absorbed feelgood culture where poverty is the backdrop to individual empowerment, and where, as Cole writes, “the banality of evil transmutes to the banality of sentimentality”. . The Lagos presented here teems with stories.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Versatile, courageous, and hopeful . The juxtaposition of encounters, seen through the eyes of a knowing flâneur, surface and then dissolve like a palimpsest composed, outside of time, by a brilliant master.”, —Rawi Hage, author of De Niro’s Game, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, “A gorgeous, crystalline, and cumulative investigation of memory, identity, and erasure. A phenomenal voice, beautiful language.”, “One of the most intriguing novels you’ll likely read…the alienated but sophisticated viewpoint is oddly poignant and compelling…reads like Camus’s L’etranger.”, “[Teju Cole’s] novels are lean, expertly sustained performances. Petina Gappah’s latest book is the short story collection Rotten Row, to be published by Faber in November. . His wanderer, however, is not man of leisure, soaking up the richness of Paris or New York. Teju Cole belongs to the former group.” Those words were written by the author Aleksandar Hemon, and they’re proven true by Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole’s companionable new essay collection. Cole writes without shock absorbers, and the ride is as terrifying as it is gorgeously set.”—Interview. . Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry influencers in the know since 1933. . On every level of engagement and critique, ‘Known and Strange Things’ is an essential and scintillating journey.” The tweet may have been “cheeky” but there is no cheekiness in this deadly essay. Read more. This is important. But don't look for plot or straight forward narration. “In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning.” —John Berger The first photograph in Teju Cole’s new book, Blind Spot, depicts neighboring suburban driveways in springtime.A chain link fence and a row of bushes with budding leaves mark property lines. . That Cole pulls this off at all is commendable. Sebald. Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole review – a world of riches. More than that, it is a book that never fails to find a thoughtful and essential thing to say, with each of its finely crafted sentences and paragraphs offering a vision of justice and order to a people beset by so many woes.”—Los Angeles Times, “[A] tightly focused but still marvelously capacious little novel . What began as a viral tweet which, in his words, “cheekily” lacerates the liberal consciences of Oprah Winfrey, Nicholas Kristof and others, became an even more viral essay responding to a fatuous documentary about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony made by some of those wide-eyed, well-meaning Americans who decant themselves over “Africa” by the planeload. . Teju Cole, best known in development circles for his trenchant critique of what he called ‘The White Saviour Industrial Complex’, is also a sophisticated novelist and art critic. Go with the flow of the walks, and you get carried by their rhythms. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. About Teju Cole: I was born to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. Emotional and intellectual life are woven too tightly together. built with cool originality . So I am what you might call a “fan”, but I have avoided the temptations of friendship. 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