Known and Strange Things
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
A blazingly intelligent first collection of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief.
With these pieces on politics, photography, travel, history and literature - many of which have become viral sensations, shared and debated around the globe - Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people and historical moments.
Cole tells of his engagement with Virginia Woolf through her diaries, before reflecting on an episode of temporary blindness in New York. He looks at the rise of Instagram and interrogates the value of its images. He examines the transition of the candidate Obama, the avid reader, into a 'forever-war' president on the global stage.
Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole's wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.
'A book written with a scalpel, a microscope, and walking shoes, full of telling details and sometimes big surprises.' Rebecca Solnit
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three experiences structure this first nonfiction collection from novelist Cole (Every Day Is for the Thief). The first section, "Reading Things," offers appreciations of writers, among them Tomas Transtr mer, Sonali Deraniyagala, Andr Aciman, Ivan Vladislavic, and, especially, W.G. Sebald, whose work raises the same ethical questions Cole asks time and again. The second, "Seeing Things," explores the work of visual artists, primarily photographers, from places as different as Mali, Russia, France, and South Africa, and casts keen-eyed scrutiny upon photography itself. Cole's tripartite structure concludes with "Being There." Throughout, Cole forges unexpected connections, as in "Unnamed Lake," in which, over the course of one sleepless night, his mind wanders over different historical moments: a Nazi performance of Beethoven at the opening of the extermination camp in Belzec, Poland (1942); the death of the last Tasmanian tiger (1936); a military coup in Nigeria (1966); a ferry disaster in Bangladesh (2014); and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki (1945). Cole is a literary performance artist, his words meticulously chosen and deployed with elegance and force. To read, see, and travel with him is to be changed by the questions that challenge him. As he observes of one writer, "The pleasure of reading him resides in the pleasure of his company"; the same may well be said of Cole.
