Teju Cole
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, last week, men who have taken lives are walking away unpunished, unquestioned even. We have their victims’ names: Mike Brown. Eric Garner. We have their final words: Hands up, don’t shoot. (Six shots fired.) I can’t breathe. (Repeated…
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Steady Dissonance
Teju Cole’s got a penchant for prose that lingers; over at The New Inquiry, he delivers once again: When I have a nap or something, J.D. said, and I fall asleep (these words in English, all of a sudden, and…
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Ebola is the Ku Klux Klan of Paper Cuts
At the New Yorker, Teju Cole mocks CNN’s recent discussion, framed around the question, “Ebola: The ISIS of Biological Agents.”
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Shooting the West Bank
Teju Cole spent his summer in Palestine, just before the latest wave of hardship. Viewing the country through his camera lens proved more affecting than not: Photography cannot capture this sorrow, but it can perhaps relay back the facts on…
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Rereading James Baldwin
Teju Cole has a long, staggeringly (good, sharp, dynamic, crushing) essay in The New Yorker about rereading James Baldwin’s Stranger In The Village: American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It…
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Figuring Out What Essays Are
What’s the difference between an essay and a novel? Teju Cole considered that question in his 2012 essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” writing that essays have points, while novels do not. While Cole continues to stand by this essay, he…
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Notable NYC: 4/12–4/18
Saturday 4/12: Michael Parker and Ethan Hauser celebrate their new books with a reading, musical DJ Jim McHugh, and literary mingle. Wythe Hotel, 6 p.m., free. Sunday 4/13: David Gerrard, Douglas Watson, and Jason Porter join the Sunday Night Fiction…
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Notable NYC: 3/29–4/4
Saturday 3/29: Courtney Zoffness, Marin Gazzaniga, Lisa Dierbeck, Marian Fontana read as part of the Brooklyn Writers Space series. BookCourt, 7 p.m., free. Joe Meno, Carl Phillips, and Simone White read at the Washington Square issue launch party. Meno’s Office…
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The Horror, the Horror of Short Form Fiction
Despite the publication this past year of behemoth novels like Donna Tartt’s 750 page The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton’s 850 page The Luminaries, current trends increasingly embrace truncated fiction. MobyLives took the conclusion of the third annual Twitter Fiction Festival…
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Teju Cole Tweets 4,000-Word Essay
Last week Teju Cole published a 4,000-word non-fiction essay on immigration, titled “A Piece of the Wall,” entirely on Twitter. BuzzFeed spoke with Cole about his decision to share the piece via the social media platform, the challenges in doing so, and…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: In Defense of Derek Walcott
This past Sunday Teju Cole reviewed in the New York Times Derek Walcott’s The Poetry of Derek Walcott: 1948-2013, selected by Glyn Maxwell and published by FSG. The book is over 600 pages and traverses more than 50 years with…
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Second Twitter Fiction Festival Approaches
Last year, we blogged about the first annual Twitter Fiction Festival after it happened. This year, we’re giving you a heads up: if you want to participate in this year’s festival, happening March 12–16, submit your idea to the organizers here.…