Africa Is a Country

Teju Cole's 'Open City'

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Teju Cole's 'Open City'

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Africa is a Country

The writer Teju Cole (remember him from the Africa’s World Cup panel at The New School and his excellent, short novella about Lagos, “Every Day for the Thief“) was recently featured in The New York Times’ T Magazine in a short feature on new “first time novelists.”

Teju Cole, 35
‘‘Open City’’ (Random House, $25)
The book: A hypersensitive Nigerian-German psychiatry resident sizes up the emotional cityscape of post-9/11 New York.
The back story: Cole is American by birth but grew up in Nigeria. His first published work — a cartoon — appeared in a magazine in Lagos when he was 15. Since then he’s been a medical student, an art history professor (Netherlandish and African), a photographer, a gardener and a dishwasher. ‘‘I still do a lot of dishwashing,’’ he says. ‘‘But not in an official capacity.’’

“Open City” is also getting a lot of pre-publication high praise.

The writer Colm Toibin is moved:

Open City is a meditation on history and culture, identity and solitude. The soft, exquisite rhythms of its prose, the display of sensibility, the lucid intelligence, make it a novel to savour and treasure.

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