Open City on Every "Best of 2011" We Can Think Of

Teju Cole's Open City, has been featured on innumerable “Best of 2011” lists in major publications and media outlets, including the New Yorker, New York Times, NPR, Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times, Atlantic, GQ, Guardian, New Statesman and TIME magazine.

Teju Cole visits Friday, Feb. 10th.

The book has been described by many critics as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man for the new millennium.

James Wood offers a lengthy review of the book, a tale of the wanderings of a Nigerian ex-pat through the streets of Manhattan, in the New Yorker in February 2011 (In a December issue, Wood also names Open City one of the five best books of 2011).

"At these moments, and, indeed, throughout Open City, one has the sense of a productive alienation, whereby Cole (or [his narrator] Julius) is able to see, with an outsider’s eyes, a slightly different, or somewhat transfigured, city. It is a place of constant deposit and erasure, like London in the work of Iain Sinclair (or in Sebald’s Austerlitz), and Julius is often drawn to the layers of sedimented historical suffering on which the city rests. There is, most obviously, the gaping void of Ground Zero: 'The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how to get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones.' " More.

Reviewer James Wood visited the Institute in February 2008.