Known and Strange Things: Essays
by Teju Cole.
Random House, 393 pp., $17.00 (paper)
Teju Cole is a kind of realm. He has written three books—two exceptional novels and the volume of essays to be considered here—as well as many uncollected essays, interviews, newspaper columns, and a vast online oeuvre made up of skeins of tweets on fixed themes, faits divers, e-mail arguments, captioned Instagrams, mixed media exercises, and rants. At the moment he is credited with more than 13,000 tweets, 263,000 Twitter followers, 1,035 photos, and around 22,000 fans who officially like his Facebook page. Even in a time when many writers are enlarging their literary footprints by means of the Internet, he is a prodigy.
There is a strong interconnectedness between the different parts of his work. Cole’s…