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| open city teju cole analysis: Every Day Is for the Thief Teju Cole, 2014-03-25 NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle | NPR | The Root | The Telegraph | The Globe and Mail NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST, PHILLIS WHEATLEY BOOK AWARD • TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE YEAR BY NEW AFRICAN MAGAZINE For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, Open City, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications. Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud. A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market. Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself. 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. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole. Praise for Every Day Is for the Thief “A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . . . extraordinary.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion.”—The Boston Globe |
| open city teju cole analysis: Open City Teju Cole, 2011 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. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Ilustrado Miguel Syjuco, 2010-06-04 ‘A dazzling and virtuosic adventure’ Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea Internationally Bestselling Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008 ‘With Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco obliges us to remake the canons of our great classics of contemporary literature. Ilustrado is, literally, a masterpiece’ Alberto Manguel It begins with a body. One anonymous winter day, the corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from the Hudson River. Gone is the controversial giant of Asian literature. And missing is the only manuscript of his final book, an exposé of the corrupt roots of the ruling Filipino families, meant to restore his once dazzling reputation. His student, Miguel, is suspicious of the suicide verdict. He investigates: first sifting through the dead man’s work for clues, then journeying from New York to Manila, seeking out family, colleagues, and anyone who might hold pieces of the puzzle. But when Miguel assembles the fragments of his mentor’s past, this ambitious and rewarding novel expands into far wider contexts – political, social, historical, literary. As patterns emerge, the mystery of a death deepens into the greater mysteries of life – and the reader makes increasingly significant discoveries of their own, until the startling revelation of the final page. ‘A big, bold, cunning, impassioned, plangent and very funny book’ Scotsman ‘Bristling with comic verve, metafictional playfulness, and an undertone of expatriate nostalgia . . . an impressive, vibrant mix of Borgesian literary labyrinth and acerbic émigré comedy’ Sunday Times ‘A seethingly ambitious debut . . . US critics have cited Bolaño as an obvious comparison; others may think of Midnight’s Children-era Rushdie’ Independent |
| open city teju cole analysis: Blind Spot Teju Cole, 2017-07-04 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. |
| open city teju cole analysis: What Isn't Remembered Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, 2021-09 Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn't Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves--a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner. A young man longs for his mother's love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother's affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family's genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the death of her best friend, and the guilt continues to haunt her decades later. Evocative and lyrical, the tales in What Isn't Remembered uncover complex events and emotions, as well as the unpredictable ways in which people adapt to what happens in their lives, finding solace from the most surprising and unexpected sources. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Public Intellectual Richard Falk, 2021-02-01 This intimate and penetrating account of a remarkable life is rich in insights about topics ranging from the academic world to global affairs to prospects for a livable society. A gripping story, with many lessons for a troubled world. NOAM CHOMSKY Whether you are a peace activist or researcher, or you care about the earth and fellow human beings, Public Intellectual will enrich you intellectually and politically. DR. VANDANA SHIVA Richard Falk is one of the few great public intellectuals and citizen pilgrims who has preserved his integrity and consistency in our dark and decadent times. This wise and powerful memoir is a gift that bestows us with a tear-soaked truth and blood-stained hope. DR. CORNEL WEST “Richard Falk recounts a life well spent trying to bend the arc of international law toward global justice. A Don Quixote tilting nobly at real dragons. His culminating vision of a better or even livable future—a ‘necessary utopia’—evokes with current urgency the slogan of Paris, May 1968: ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible.’”DANIEL ELLSBERG This political memoir reveals how Richard Falk became prominent in America and internationally as both a public intellectual and citizen pilgrim. Falk built a life of progressive commitment, highlighted by visits to North Vietnam where he met PM Pham Von Dong, to Iran during the Islamic Revolution after meeting Khomeini in Paris, to South Africa where he met with Nelson Mandela at the height of the struggle against apartheid, and frequently to Palestine and Israel. His memoir is studded with encounters with well-known public figures in law, academia, political activism and even Hollywood. Falk mentored the thesis of Robert Mueller, taught David Petraeus. His publications and activism describe various encounters with embedded American militarism, especially as expressed by governmental resistance to responsible efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and his United Nations efforts on behalf of the rights of the Palestinian people. In 2010 he was named Outstanding Public Scholar in Political Economy by the International Studies Association. He has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009 |
| open city teju cole analysis: Humanitarian Intervention and Legitimacy Wars Richard Falk, 2014-08-21 In the aftermath of the Cold War there has been a dramatic shift in thinking about the maintenance of peace and security on a global level. This shift is away from a preoccupation with how to prevent major wars between sovereign states to a preoccupation about non-state transnational warfare and violence and strife within states in a world order that continues to be juridically and politically delimited by spatial ideas of national sovereignty and national independence as signified by international boundaries. In this book, Richard Falk draws upon these changes to examine the ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention in the 21st Century. As well as analysing the theoretical and conceptual basis of the responsibility to protect, the book also contains a number of case studies looking at Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Syria. The final section explores when humanitarian intervention can succeed and the changing nature of international political legitimacy in countries such as India, Tibet, South Africa and Palestine. This book will be of interest to students of International Relations theory, Peace Studies and Global Politics. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays Claire Messud, 2020-10-13 A glimpse into a beloved novelist’s inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again an absolute master storyteller (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times). |
| open city teju cole analysis: Fleishman Is in Trouble Taffy Brodesser-Akner, 2020-07-07 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “A masterpiece” (NPR) about marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition Now an Emmy Award–nominated FX limited series on Hulu, starring Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Entertainment Weekly, The New York Public Library ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today Vanity Fair, Vogue, NPR, Chicago Tribune, GQ, Vox, Refinery29, Elle, The Guardian, Real Simple, Financial Times, Parade, Good Housekeeping, New Statesman, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Evening Standard, Thrillist, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, BookRiot, Shelf Awareness Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this. As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place. A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope. Alma’s Best Jewish Novel of the Year • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book |
| open city teju cole analysis: Turbulence Giles Foden, 2010-08-17 The D-day landings—the fate of 2.5 million men, three thousand landing craft and the entire future of Europe depend on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing on an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? And what is the relationship between predictability and turbulence, one of the last great mysteries of modern physics? Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this—but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Henry Meadows, a young math prodigy from the Met Office, is sent to Scotland to uncover Ryman’s system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined. When Henry meets Gill, Ryman’s beautiful wife, events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control. From Giles Foden, prizewinning author of The Last King of Scotland, a gripping blend of fact and fiction in a novel about how human beings deal with uncertainty. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Men in Space Tom McCarthy, 2012-02-07 The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy—acclaimed author of Remainder and C—Men in Space is set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism. It follows an oddball cast—dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut—as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. Planting the themes that McCarthy’s later works develop, here McCarthy questions the meaning of all kinds of space—physical, political, emotional, and metaphysical—as reflected in the characters’ various disconnections. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration. With an afterword by Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers |
| open city teju cole analysis: Wave Sonali Deraniyagala, 2013-03-05 A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family. On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation at the seaside resort of Yala on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. Sonali Deraniyagala has written an extraordinarily honest, utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family's life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Odysseus Abroad Amit Chaudhuri, 2015-10-14 In this highly acclaimed novel, Amit Chaudhuri tells us the story of one unremarkable July day in 1980s’ London. Ananda, student of poetry, is lonely, and somewhat fraught, as he grapples with the big questions of literature. His uncle, Radhesh, a bachelor leading an early retired life in a Belsize Park bedsit, is self-involved, eccentric. On this day, they find uncertain companionship as they circle around their past and take stock of their place in the city. Ananda and Radhesh both provide a foil to each other and yet remain apart, as Chaudhuri shows why he is considered his generation’s best chronicler of acutely observed life. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Land of Love and Ruins Oddný Eir, 2016-10-25 “Oddný Eir is an authentic author, philosopher and mystic. She weaves together diaries and fiction. She is the writer I feel can best express the female psyche of now and has bridged the gap between rural Iceland and Western philosophy. A true pioneer!!!!!!!!” —Björk The winner of the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize in 2012, Land of Love and Ruins is the debut novel by a daring new voice in international fiction: Oddný Eir. Written in the form of a diary but with fantastical linguistic verve, the narrator sets out on a universal quest: to find a place to belong—and a way of being in the world. Paradoxically, her longing to settle down drives her to embark on all kinds of journeys, physical and mental, through time and space, in order to find answers to questions that concern not only her personally, but also the whole of humankind. She explores various modes of living, ponders different types of relationships and contemplates her bond with her family, land and nation; trying to find a balance between companionship and independence, movement and stability, past, present, and future. An enchanting blend of autobiography, diary, philosophical inquiry, and fantasy, Land of Love and Ruins is a richly imagined and utterly unique book about being human in the modern world. |
| open city teju cole analysis: African Migration Narratives Cajetan Iheka, 2024-04 Examines the representations of migration in African literature, film, and other visual media, with an eye to the stylistic features of these works as well as their contributions to debates on migration |
| open city teju cole analysis: Open Water Caleb Azumah Nelson, 2021-04-13 WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION “Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.”—Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty. This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent. |
| open city teju cole analysis: The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau, 1984 Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Whereabouts Jhumpa Lahiri, 2021-04-27 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies--her first in nearly a decade. Jhumpa Lahiri’s ravishing new novel follows an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city. In the arc of one year, in the middle of her life’s journey, she realizes that she’s lost her way. Whereabouts celebrates ordinary life and community while exploring existential themes of presence and absence. Lahiri’s narrator, a woman questioning her place in the world, wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and a refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home acts as her companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone. We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change. Whereabouts is an exquisitely nuanced portrait of urban solitude, one that shimmers with beauty and possibility. It is also a thrilling departure for Jhumpa Lahiri, her first novel written in Italian as well as the first time she has self-translated a full-length work. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But this novel, a play of shadow and light, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility, and an artist reveling in a new form. |
| open city teju cole analysis: A Dog's Ransom Patricia Highsmith, 2002-08-17 Long out of print, this Highsmith classic resurfaces with a vengeance. The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of this novel that will give dog owners nightmares for years to come. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In A Dog's Ransom, Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle. This work attesets to Highsmith's reputation as the poet of apprehension (Graham Greene). |
| open city teju cole analysis: Tremor of Intent Anthony Burgess, 2013-08-05 A brilliantly funny spy novel, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, and treachery. From the author of the ground-breaking A Clockwork Orange. Denis Hillier is an aging British agent based in Yugoslavia. His old school friend Roper has defected to the USSR to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must bring Roper back to England or risk losing his fat retirement bonus. As thoughtful as it is funny, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, treachery, and religion. Anthony Burgess's cast of astonishing characters includes Roper's German prostitute wife; Miss Devi and her Tamil love treatise; and the large Mr. Theodorescu, international secret monger and lascivious gourmand. A rare combination of the deadly serious and the absurd, the lofty and the lusty, Tremor of Intent will hold you in its thrall. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Half-Blood Blues Esi Edugyan, 2013-10-28 The brilliant, bestselling, Giller Prize–winning novel Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues took the literary world by storm when it was first published, captivating readers and reviewers with its audacity, power, and sheer brilliance. The novel won or was nominated for every literary prize in Canada—and many international ones, too, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize. It was hailed as one of the best books of the year by Oprah, The Globe and Mail, Amazon, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Vancouver Sun, and it was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, the narrator of Half-Blood Blues, musician Sid Griffiths, leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world and into the heart of his own guilty conscience. The bestselling, award-winning Half-Blood Blues is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves—and demand of others—in the name of art. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Prayers to Survive Wars that Last Eze, Chielozona, 2017-11-28 “In this meditative and quietly lyrical approach, Chielozona Eze marks himself in this new African poetics not as a voice of easy protest, not as the voice of a bombast and rhetorical turn, but as the voice of an African poet in the twenty-first century trying to make sense of all the hunger, anger, war, loss, and desecration that has haunted his life and the lives of many Africans but remains always poised on that tender grace, that ease of dance, that transubstantiation that works an alchemy that is not about the outcome but always about the struggle, the engagement, and the terms thereof.” Chris Abani, Board of Trustee Professor of English, Northwestern University “This collection is a fitting memorial to a war still unatoned for and its accompanying sense of bereavement and lack of closure. In tune with a pervasive sense of loss and quiet recollection, the poems are meditative, packing a punch in their ambling profundity; Chielozona Eze does not blame; he speaks of introspection and love.” Amatoritsero Ede, Publisher & Managing Editor, Maple Tree Literary Supplement |
| open city teju cole analysis: Goodness and the Literary Imagination Toni Morrison, 2019 Morrison's essay “Goodness: altruism and the literary imagination is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works |
| open city teju cole analysis: Touching Strangers , 2014 A collection of portraits featuring strangers physically interacting raises questions about the possibilities of positive human connection in a diverse world. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Making Black History Dominique Haensell, 2021-10-04 This study proposes that – rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics – Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism. Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment. Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here: https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/ |
| open city teju cole analysis: Telegrams of the Soul Peter Altenberg, 2005-04-04 If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose. So said Thomas Mann of the work of PeterAltenberg. A virtuoso Fin-de-Siècle Viennese innovator of what he called the telegram style of writing, Altenberg’s signature short prose straddles the line between the poetic and the prosaic, fiction and observation, harsh verity and whimsical vignette. Inspired by the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire and the Feuilleton—a light journalistic reflection of his day—Altenberg carved out a spare, strikingly modern aesthetic that speaks with an eerie prescience to our own impatient time. Peter Wortsman’s new selection and translation reads like a sly lyrical wink from the turnof-the-century of the telegram to the turn-of-the-millennium of email. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Welcome to Lagos Chibundu Onuzo, 2018-05-01 “Storylines and twists abound. But action is secondary to atmosphere: Onuzo excels at evoking a stratified city, where society weddings feature ‘ice sculptures as cold as the unmarried belles’ and thugs write tidy receipts for kickbacks extorted from homeless travelers.” —The New Yorker When army officer Chike Ameobi is ordered to kill innocent civilians, he knows it is time to desert his post. As he travels toward Lagos with Yemi, his junior officer, and into the heart of a political scandal involving Nigeria’s education minister, Chike becomes the leader of a new platoon, a band of runaways who share his desire for a different kind of life. Among them is Fineboy, a fighter with a rebel group, desperate to pursue his dream of becoming a radio DJ; Isoken, a 16–year–old girl whose father is thought to have been killed by rebels; and the beautiful Oma, escaping a wealthy, abusive husband. Full of humor and heart, Welcome to Lagos is a high–spirited novel about aspirations and escape, innocence and corruption. It offers a provocative portrait of contemporary Nigeria that marks the arrival in the United States of an extraordinary young writer. |
| open city teju cole analysis: House of Holes Nicholson Baker, 2011 Visit the House of Holes, where the motto is Pleasure First, and discover a solution to every sexual problem, insight into every sexual intrigue, or play out your greatest sexual fantasy. Men can begin with a 'good, friendly penis scrub', take the magic sperm sniff test, or visit the Porndecahedron. Greedy women can visit the Hall of the Penises, shy women can order a partner with a 'voluntary head detachment', curious couples can investigate each other further with a 'cross crotchal interplasmic transfer'. But ladies, watch out for the Pearloiner, who might just steal from you what you cherish most ... |
| open city teju cole analysis: Chronic City Jonathan Lethem, 2010-03-04 Chase Insteadman is a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, living off his earnings as a child star. Chase owes his current social status to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, and trapped in a vague routine punctuated only by Upper Eastside dinner parties and engagements. Into Chase's life enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop-critic, whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus' countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Together Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the Truth - that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought. Beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, Lethem's new novel is as always, utterly unique. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Africa's Tarnished Name Chinua Achebe, 2018 Essays on the history, complexity, diversity of a continent |
| open city teju cole analysis: The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro, 2009-01-08 *Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past. 'A triumph . . . This wholly convincing portrait of a human life unweaving before your eyes is inventive and absorbing, by turns funny, absurd and ultimately very moving.' Sunday Times 'A dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture.' New York TImes Book Review |
| open city teju cole analysis: What IS Sex? Alenka Zupancic, 2017-09-08 Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, “What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan “orthopedists of the unconscious.” Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Human Archipelago Teju Cole, 2018 With Cole's words and Sheikh's photos of displaced humans, 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?--Publisher's description |
| open city teju cole analysis: The Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy, 2022-05 |
| open city teju cole analysis: A God in Ruins Kate Atkinson, 2015-05-05 The stunning companion to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life, one of the best novels I've read this century (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl). Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. Her new novel tells the story of Ursula Todd's beloved younger brother Teddy—would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband, and father—as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is facing the difficulties of living in a future he never expected to have. The stunning companion to Life After Life, A God in Ruins explores the loss of innocence, the fraught transition from the war to peace time, and the pain of being misunderstood, especially as we age. Proving once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest writers working today (The Chicago Tribune), A God in Ruins is the triumphant return of a modern master. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Walking New York Stephen Miller, 2016-10-03 Walking New York is an idiosyncratic guide to New York--a study of twelve American writers who walked in New York and wrote about their impressions of the city in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. |
| open city teju cole analysis: My Paris Gail Scott, 2003 A Canadian woman keeps an extraordinary journal of her time in a Parisian studio. |
| open city teju cole analysis: Open Season C. J. Box, 2025-06-03 The first novel in the thrilling series featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett from #1 New York Times bestselling author C. J. Box. Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden—especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way—is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in. Even after the outfitter murders, as they have been dubbed by the local press after the discovery of the two more bodies, are solved, Joe continues to investigate, uneasy with the easy explanation offered by the local police. As Joe digs deeper into the murders, he soon discovers that the outfitter brought more than death to his backdoor: he brought Joe an endangered species, thought to be extinct, which is now living in his woodpile. But if word of the existence of this endangered species gets out, it will destroy any chance of InterWest, a multi-national natural gas company, building an oil pipeline that would bring the company billions of dollars across Wyoming, through the mountains and forests of Twelve Sleep. The closer Joe comes to the truth behind the outfitter murders, the endangered species and InterWest, the closer he comes to losing everything he holds dear. |
| open city teju cole analysis: New Uses for Failure Adam Colman, 2018 Literary Nonfiction. A brave new mode of literature has been emerging in the work of Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others. Call it what you will; Adam Colman calls it essayistic fiction. In this sharp, playful book, Colman dives deep into Ben Lerner's 10:04 to create a how to manual for anyone who wants to write, or simply understand, essayistic fiction. A manifesto, a critical analysis, and a winking work of satire, NEW USES FOR FAILURE marks the arrival of a sparkling new genre. This is part of Fiction Advocate's Afterwords series. |
| open city teju cole analysis: The Loney Andrew Michael Hurley, 2017 If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney - that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was impossible to truly know the place. It changed with each influx and retreat, and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they could escape its insidious currents. No one ever went near the water. No one apart from us, that is. I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn't stay hidden for ever, no matter how much I wanted it to. No matter how hard I tried to forget ... |
OpenAI
May 21, 2025 · ChatGPT for business just got better—with connectors to internal tools, MCP support, record mode & SSO to Team, and flexible pricing for Enterprise. We believe our …
OPEN Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Jun 14, 2012 · The meaning of OPEN is having no enclosing or confining barrier : accessible on all or nearly all sides. How to use open in a sentence. Synonym Discussion of Open.
OPEN | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
OPEN definition: 1. not closed or fastened: 2. ready to be used or ready to provide a service: 3. not closed in or…. Learn more.
U.S. Open: Tee times, groupings announced for Round 4
3 days ago · The 125th U.S. Open concludes Sunday from historic Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania as it hosts for the 10th time, the most of any club in the history of the …
OPEN Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Open definition: not closed or barred at the time, as a doorway by a door, a window by a sash, or a gateway by a gate.. See examples of OPEN used in a sentence.
Open - definition of open by The Free Dictionary
Affording unobstructed entrance and exit; not shut or closed. b. Affording unobstructed passage or view: open waters; the open countryside. 2. a. Having no protecting or concealing cover: an …
Open: Definition, Meaning, and Examples - US Dictionary
Jul 27, 2024 · "Open" Definition: What Does "Open" Mean? The term "open" is used in various contexts to describe states of accessibility, visibility, and physical space. Here, we will explore …
OpenAI
May 21, 2025 · ChatGPT for business just got better—with connectors to internal tools, MCP support, record mode & SSO to Team, and flexible pricing for Enterprise. We believe our …
OPEN Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Jun 14, 2012 · The meaning of OPEN is having no enclosing or confining barrier : accessible on all or nearly all sides. How to use open in a sentence. Synonym Discussion of Open.
OPEN | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
OPEN definition: 1. not closed or fastened: 2. ready to be used or ready to provide a service: 3. not closed in or…. Learn more.
U.S. Open: Tee times, groupings announced for Round 4
3 days ago · The 125th U.S. Open concludes Sunday from historic Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania as it hosts for the 10th time, the most of any club in the history of the …
OPEN Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Open definition: not closed or barred at the time, as a doorway by a door, a window by a sash, or a gateway by a gate.. See examples of OPEN used in a sentence.
Open - definition of open by The Free Dictionary
Affording unobstructed entrance and exit; not shut or closed. b. Affording unobstructed passage or view: open waters; the open countryside. 2. a. Having no protecting or concealing cover: an open …
Open: Definition, Meaning, and Examples - US Dictionary
Jul 27, 2024 · "Open" Definition: What Does "Open" Mean? The term "open" is used in various contexts to describe states of accessibility, visibility, and physical space. Here, we will explore …
