Teju Cole

Feeling adrift after ending a relationship, Julius, a young Nigerian doctor living in New York, takes long walks through the city while listening to the stories of fellow immigrants until a shattering truth is revealed. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.

A Novel

Open City

Every Day is for the Thief

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

Known and Strange Things

A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City “A remarkable performance from one of the most brilliant and singular minds at work today.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling. A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis. We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life. Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

Tremor

The shadow of a tree in upstate New York. A hotel room in Switzerland. A young stranger in the Congo. In Blind Spot, readers will follow Teju Cole's inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm, as he continues to refine the voice and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. In more than 150 pairs of images and surprising, lyrical text, Cole explores his complex relationship to the visual world through his two great passions: writing and photography. Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature.

Blind Spot

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 A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world. Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul. “[A] prismatic debut . . . beautiful, subtle, [and] original.”—The New Yorker “A psychological hand grenade.”—The Atlantic “Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose.”—The Seattle Times “A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation.”—The Economist

Writers from Alice Walker to Michael Ondaatje to Claire Messud share their thoughts on one of the most vital gatherings of writers and readers in the world. The Palestine Festival of Literature was established in 2008 by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Brigid Keenan, Victoria Brittain and Omar Robert Hamilton. Bringing writers to Palestine from all corners of the globe, it aimed to break the cultural siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation, to strengthen artistic links with the rest of the world, and to reaffirm, in the words of Edward Said, "the power of culture over the culture of power." Celebrating the tenth anniversary of PalFest, This Is Not a Border is a collection of essays, poems, and sketches from some of the world's most distinguished artists, responding to their experiences at this unique festival. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and hope in the most desperate of situations. Contributing authors include J. M. Coetzee, China Miéville, Alice Walker, Geoff Dyer, Claire Messud, Henning Mankell, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, Mohammed Hanif, Gillian Slovo, Adam Foulds, Susan Abulhawa, Ahdaf Soueif, Jeremy Harding, Brigid Keenan, Rachel Holmes, Suad Amiry, Gary Younge, Jamal Mahjoub, Molly Crabapple, Najwan Darwish, Nathalie Handal, Omar Robert Hamilton, Pankaj Mishra, Raja Shehadeh, Selma Dabbagh, William Sutcliffe, Atef Abu Saif, Yasmin El-Rifae, Sabrina Mahfouz, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Mercedes Kemp, Ru Freeman.

Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

This Is Not a Border

"In Black Paper, Teju Cole meditates on what it means to keep our humanity--and witness the humanity of others--in a time of darkness. "Darkness," Cole writes, "is not empty." Through art, politics, travel, and memoir, he returns us to the wisdom latent in shadows, and sets the darkness echoing. The opening essay sets the mood for the book, as Cole travels to southern Italy and Sicily to view a series of Caravaggio paintings. He ponders the suffering that Caravaggio ("a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror, and a pest") both dealt out and experienced, and the disquieting echoes of that suffering in the abandoned boats of migrants arriving on nearby shores. This collection also gathers several of Cole's recent columns on photography for the New York Times Magazine and offers a suite of elegies to lost friends who show him--and us--ways of mourning in times of death"--

Writing in a Dark Time

Black Paper

A powerful, wide-ranging novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the celebrated author of Open City Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling. A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis. We're invited to experience these events and more through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man currently working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life. Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, history, and much more, as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

Fernweh

Alex Webb

Rebecca Norris Webb

In this series, Aperture Foundation works with the worlds top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photographyoffering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, internationally acclaimed color photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, offer their expert insight into street photography and the poetic image. Through words and photographstheir own and othersthey invite the reader into the heart of their artistic processes. They share their thoughts about a wide range of practical and philosophical issues, from questions about seeing and being in the world with a camera, to how to shape a complete body of work in a way thats both structured and intuitive.

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image

Jeder Tag gehört dem Dieb

Hirsiza Her Gün Bayram

Fazal Sheikh

For the past 25 years, Fazal Sheikh has highlighted the plight of displaced people and refugees around the world. He has photographed people driven from their homes by war as well as those upended by the redrawing of national borders and the reassertion of racial and ethnic divisions. Sheikh has also made sublime photographs of landscapes altered by political and environmental crises. In the past two years, the shift to the political right in the US has been replicated across Europe, the Middle East, Central and East Africa and Southeast Asia, as authoritarian governments and xenophobia have increased. As an act of refusal to these political trends, Sheikh sought out the celebrated novelist and critic Teju Cole for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to the ideal of a compassionate global community as well as the importance of individual courage. The resulting book represents the two authors' distinct visions, their shared values and mutual spirit of cooperation. With Cole's words and Sheikh's photos we are confronted with fundamental and newly necessary questions of coexistence: who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me? Who is a stranger? What does it mean to be human? Teju Cole (born 1975) is a Brooklyn-based novelist, essayist and photographer. His honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Cole's photography book Blind Spot was shortlisted for the Paris Photo--Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. He is the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. The photographs of Fazal Sheikh (born 1965) have been exhibited internationally from Tate Modern, London, to the Metropolitan Museum and United Nations Headquarters in New York and the Mapfre Foundation, Madrid. The author of 15 monographs, many published by Steidl, Sheikh is currently the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Human Archipelago

A expressão "cidade aberta" pode referir-se a uma cidade ocupada pelo exército invasor durante uma guerra e poupada em troca de rendição. A Nova York pós-Onze de Setembro percebida por Julius, um jovem psiquiatra residente no hospital Columbia Presbyterian, carrega em si um pouco dessa atmosfera - é uma cidade de traumas não admitidos e muita solidão. Julius faz longas caminhadas após o trabalho, como contraponto a seus atarefados dias no hospital. Além da "evocação de liberdade", esses passeios são o motor de suas reflexões e reminiscências, pelas quais ele relembra sua história, sua infância na Nigéria, sua condição de imigrante, e também a história da própria cidade em que vive e dos habitantes dela. Teju Cole parece transferir muito de si ao protagonista do romance - ambos são nigerianos que saíram de sua terra natal para estudar nos Estados Unidos. Além de escritor, Cole é também fotógrafo, e a observação precisa e o zelo com os detalhes parecem ser seu principal legado a Julius. Numa sucessão de meditações, informações históricas, reflexões sobre música e literatura, e nítidas descrições das paisagens urbanas - motivos que renderam a Cole muitas comparações a W. G. Sebald -, o personagem estabelece uma espécie de diário não cronológico de suas reminiscências nigerianas e nova-iorquinas.

Cidade aberta

Vertrouwde en vreemde dingen

Een jonge Nigeriaans-Amerikaanse psychiater ontmoet tijdens zijn lange wandelingen in Manhattan verschillende mensen, associeert met zijn verleden en roept veel vragen op door zijn scherpe analyses.

Open stad / druk 1

Ivan Vladislavic

Race, politics, identity, photography: South African writer Ivan Vladislavic reminds us nothing is black and white.

Teju Cole

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