Paperback. Pub Date :2012-02-01 Pages: 272 Language: English Publisher: Faber &amp; Faber The past. if there is such a thing. is mostly empty space. great expanses of nothing. in which significant persons and events float Nigeria. was like that for me: mostly forgotten. except for those few things that I remembered with outsize intensity.Along the streets of Manhattan. a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly The walks meet a need for Julius:. they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work. and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships. his recent breakup with his girlfriend. his present. his past. Though he is navigating the busy parts of town. the impression of countless faces does nothing to assuage his feelings of isolation But it is not only a physical landscape he covers;. Julius crisscrosses social territory ...

Open City

Teju Cole

Faber&Faber

Tremor

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 MailNATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST, PHILLIS WHEATLEY BOOK AWARD • TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE YEAR BY NEW AFRICAN MAGAZINEFor 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  “Crisp, affecting . . . Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.”—The New York Times Book Review  “Hugely rewarding . . . both a celebration of one of the world’s most vibrant cities and a lament over what can be one of the most frustrating and difficult places to live. It is also a story of family breakup and an uneasy homecoming—the narrator has been away for fifteen years and must relearn how to navigate a place that was once home.”—NPR“[Every Day Is for the Thief has] a restraint that allows [Cole] to slip in these exquisitely rendered observations on life, love, art that leave you feeling richer and more attuned to your own reality once you’ve finished reading.”—Dinaw Mengestu, The AtlanticFrom the Hardcover edition.

Every Day is for the Thief

Literature & Fiction

United States

KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS

Known and Strange Things

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

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 Cit y. 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.

Blind Spot

Photography & Video

Open City: A Novel

Random House]

Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction

Music & Literature 3 brings to light the life's work of three artists who have to date been denied--by geography, by language, and by politics--their rightful positions on the world stage. The Australian writer Gerald Murnane, a rumored Nobel Prize candidate, has been deemed 'a genius on the level of Beckett' by Teju Cole, who opens this issue with a spirited exchange of long letters with the Aussie great. For the first time, Murnane's entire catalog is introduced by top writers and critics, and we glimpse his three remarkable archives, which the author insists will remain unpublished until after his death. 'The Interior of Gaaldine,' the infamous text that explains his fourteen-year absence from the world of fiction, rounds out more than 120 pages of new material on and by one of our finest yet little-known Anglophone writers. The issue's second half is devoted to the Slovak composer Vladimír Godár and his unlikely collaborator, the Moravian violinist-singer Iva Bittová, who honed their crafts under the pall of the Communist regime and who only in recent years have begun cultivating worldwide audiences. Now, for the first time, Godár's artistic writings as well as his manuscripts are available in English, alongside a portfolio of photographs and an oral history of Bittová's career, as told by some of her closest collaborators and artistic partners.

Music & Literature No. 3

et.al.

Hari Kunzru

Gerald Murnane

Vladimír Godár

Iva Bittová

Music & Literature, Inc.

Every Day is for the Thief is an account of a Nigerian in the diaspora who returns home after many years abroad. The book gains its strength as much from its subject matter (contemporary Lagosian life as experienced by a visiting former resident) as from its prose style (reminiscent of John Berger and J.M. Coetzee). Teju Cole's nuanced book explores themes as diverse as the minor joys of daily Lagosian existence and the crudities of contemporary forms of corruption. His work is both a critique and a message of hope to a Nigeria rapidly in transformation.

Every Day Is for the Thief

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