Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole · 2016
Cole's essay collection covers photography, travel, race, literature, and hashtag activism. The finest debut essay collection by a writer of his generation. His "Small Fates" and photography essays are formally inventive in ways that expand what the essay can do.
The case against
Fifty-plus pieces swept together from magazines, and it shows: blog-length squibs sit beside the strong photography essays, Sebald gets genuflected to every forty pages, and the political columns have the shelf life of the news cycle that prompted them. Cole at his best is in here, maybe a third of the time. An editor with a knife would have helped.
Essays · the Pro canon
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