Teju Cole

If your previous experience with Beverly Nichols has been the books of his funny, warm and affectionate gardening trilogy (Down the Garden Path, Sunlight on the Lawn, etc), caveat lector. This is a disturbingly candid account of Nichols’ monstrously destructive alcoholic father, and Nichols’ own determination to escape from a family environment that was toxic in the extreme – and a harrowing saga of a deep and mutual hatred between father and son.

Dropout Neville Lister accompanies acclaimed photographer Saul Auerbach for a day, to learn a lesson for life. They play a game: from a hill above Johannesburg they pick three houses and decide to knock on their doors in search of a story. Auerbach's images of the first two will become classic portraits, but soon the light fades. Lister only reaches the third house decades later, returning to post-apartheid South Africa and a Johannesburg altered almost beyond recognition.

A unique blend of travelogue, musings and poetry, A Stranger's Pose draws the reader into a world of encounters haunted by the absence of home, estrangement from a lover and family tragedies. The author's recollections and reflections of fragments of his journeys to African cities, from Dakar to Douala, Bamako to Benin, and Khartoum to Casablanca, offer a compelling and very personal meditation on the meaning of home and the generosity of strangers to a lone traveller.

When a young man's mutilated body is found at an Oregon rest stop, along with his pregnant girlfriend who is alive, but comatose, psychologist Claire Norris is assigned to treat the survivor at a private mental hospital where she, along with an ex-homicide detective, attempt to unravel this twisted case.

The picturesque vistas and apparent stability of Switzerland have made it an elusive subject for contemporary photography. Over a five-year period (2014-2019), Cole found a distinctly new way to look at a country that has been the quintessence of tourist experience for almost two centuries. Fernweh muses on the German word for a longing to be elsewhere. Cole's meditative and scrupulously composed work, made with colour film, is evocative of the hidden history of the Alpine nation as well as of its highly curated terrain. Returning to Switzerland year after year, Cole shares the patience and mild palette of luminaries of contemporary European photography - but the constructivist tension in these images is all his own. With photographs shot in every corner of the country - from Vaud to Graubünden to Lugano - Fernweh creates a vision of Switzerland that, though largely devoid of human presence, is rich in human traces; none more so than Cole's own distinct way of seeing.

In the period leading up to the November 3, 2020 elections in the United States, Teju Cole began to photograph his kitchen counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working in the still life tradition of Chardin, Cezanne, and the Dutch masters, as well as such contemporary photographers as Laura Letinsky and Jan Groover, he photographed every day over the course of five weeks. Unlike those forebears, Cole left his arrangements entirely to chance, the bowls and plates moving in their unpredictable constellations. What emerges is a portrait, across time, of one kitchen counter in one home at a time of social, cultural, and political upheaval. Alongside the photographs is a long written essay, as wide-ranging in its concerns--hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography--as the photographs are delimited in theirs. The text and photographic sequences are interspersed with an anonymous handwritten eighteenth century cookbook from Cambridge.

"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."--

OCLC 937878184

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