Alert! Fans of Teju Cole’s work will be delighted to hear that news of his latest book has been confirmed.
Known and Strange Things – a collection of 40-plus essays spanning art, literature, and politics, with topics from Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin to President Obama and Boko Haram – will be published by Penguin Random House in 2016.
Entertainment Weekly reports that the upcoming book will contain some of Cole’s essays that have gone viral, including “The White Savior Industrial Complex” and “Unmournable Bodies”.
Teju Cole, author of Open City and Every Day is For The Thief, will publish his first book of essays with Random House in 2016: a collection called Known and Strange Things. The 40-plus essays in the book will span art, literature, and politics (Cole is the photography critic for New York Times Magazine), with topics from Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin to President Obama and Boko Haram. The collection will include pre-published essays that gone viral, like “The White Industrial Savior Complex,” first published in The Atlantic.
Cole has often professed to be an admirer of Seamus Heaney, and seems to have taken the title for Known and Strange Things from Heaney’s poem “Postscript”:
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.- Seamus Heaney
Cole tweeted the line, along with another from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The First Duino Elegy”, last year. The juxtaposition give readers a hint of what the tone of the collection may be:
"The unbroken news that takes shape out of silence," said one friend.
"A hurry through which known and strange things pass," said another.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 3, 2014
Cole, originally from Nigeria, is a writer, art historian, and photographer. He is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and photography critic of the New York Times Magazine. His novel Open City was a major international success, winning various awards including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction and the New York City Book Award for Fiction. Open City is the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist living in New York City five years after 9/11. It is a haunting narrative about identity, dislocation, and history.
Cole’s first book was a novella titled Every Day is for the Thief, also a big hit internationally. It’s about a young man living in New York City who goes to Lagos, where Cole grew up, for a short and bewildering visit. In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief — originally published in Nigeria in 2007 — is a wholly original work of fiction.
For fans of Cole’s fiction we have comforting news. According to his website he is also working on a new novel:
I’m at work on my third book, Radio Lagos, a non-fictional narrative of contemporary Lagos. I have also contributed chapters and introductions to a number of books.
Related links:
Book details
- Open City by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780571279432
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- Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780812995787
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Image courtesy of Teju Cole