Known and Strange Things (Random House) is a collection of Teju Cole’s essays and other short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere online. You might have come across his piece “A Reader’s War” from 2013, which included Cole’s versions of the opening lines of seven famous novels, reimagined for an era of drone strikes: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s”; “Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.” The book opens with “Black Body,” which describes Cole’s visit to the Swiss town of Leukerbad, where James Baldwin spent several winters in the early 1950s, an experience that led to “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin’s landmark essay on race. Cole is the photography critic for the New York Times Magazine, and several pieces in Known and Strange Things explore that medium. The essay “Google’s Macchia,” for example, considers photography “in its moment of crisis”: “There’s never been so much photography on view, and most of it is bad.” Another, “The Atlas of Effect,” explores the ramifications of Google’s Image Search. Cole is thoughtful, angry and articulate, and well worth reading.
