Known and Strange Things

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 todays 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 Coles 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