Known and Strange Things
London : Faber & Faber : 2016Description: 30cm : 416 PagesContent type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volume001: 42677ISBN: 9780571331390Subject(s): Poetry | Drama | PhotographyDDC classification: 814.6 COLItem type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 814.6 COL (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Checked out | 24/04/2023 | 112436 |
Browsing MAIN LIBRARY shelves, Shelving location: Book, Collection: PRINT Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)
814.54 SON Against interpretation / | 814.54 SON Styles of radical will / | 814.54 WAT Crackpot : the obsessions of John Waters / | 814.6 COL Known and Strange Things | 815.54 MCI Bright lights, big city / | 815.54 WEB The graduate / | 815.54 WEB The graduate / |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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.
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Publishers Weekly Review
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 Tranströmer, Sonali Deraniyagala, André 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. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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. The same can be said for the social and critical commentary by award-winning novelist Cole (Every Day Is for the Thief, 2015) in this essay collection, his first nonfiction title. The articles analyze various aspects of culture, from poetry, books (a conversation with author Aleksandar Hemon is included here), photography, and more. Cole's insights cast fresh light on even the most quotidian of objects. He shares his reasoning about why all selfies are the same; and, in a beautiful essay about artist-collectors, shows how the very ubiquitousness of pictures in today's digital, smartphone world is leading to our interpreting visual art in new ways. An American brought up in Lagos, Cole places race, especially in the context of an outsider-insider perspective, under the microscope as well. A particularly moving essay discusses the disconnect between the America of his Nigerian imagination and the one he eventually came home to. Cole's collection performs an important service by elevating public discourse in an unsettled time.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 BooklistKirkus Book Review
A striking collection of essays that will leave readers wanting to reimagine our contemporary environment.In his first work of nonfiction, Cole (Every Day Is for the Thief, 2015, etc.) crafts an anthological book of reflections divided into four parts: "Reading Things," "Seeing Things," "Being Here," and "Epilogue." Without much warning, readers are immediately thrown into the current issues that punctuate the news, social media, and the literary community. Acclaimed as both photographer and art theorist, Cole uses short essays to communicate fundamental ideas about his craft: "a photograph isa little machine of ironies that contains within it a number of oppositions: light and dark, memory and forgetting, ethics and injustice, permanence and evanescence." The author discusses James Baldwin and Jacques Derrida, and he analyzes the works of various photographers and poets throughout the years. The result is a compilation of 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 black body comes prejudged, and as a result it is placed in needless jeopardy," writes Cole. In fact, questions of race identity and justice are paramount for the author. "History won't let go of us," he writes. "We're pinned to it." What's clear is that Cole perseveres in breaking away from historical tropes, offering to his readers differing perspectives that emerge from wide-ranging areas of study. "What always interests meindeed obsesses meis the way we engage in history," he writes. "Except there is no we.' Americans do it differently and, often, irresponsibly and without particular interest." Moments like these will make American readers stop to think, question the population they belong to, and find ways to make it better. The hope that Cole infuses in his prose is mirrored with poetically entrancing sentences: "We are not mayflies. We have known afternoons, and we live day after day for a great many days." A bold, honest, and controversially necessary read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.There are no comments on this title.