available on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKDupjm2fU8&feature=youtu.be
The giant of world literature and Hudson Valley resident passed away on March 21, 2013. Read More......
Showing posts with label nigeria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nigeria. Show all posts
Monday, April 1, 2013
Longer Chinua Achebe Interview on YouTube
available on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKDupjm2fU8&feature=youtu.be
The giant of world literature and Hudson Valley resident passed away on March 21, 2013. Read More......
Friday, March 22, 2013
Chinua Achebe Dies
Though he never received the Nobel Prize, his 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, is the world's most widely read African novel.
See an excerpt from his talk here in Albany on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZNAMPsmS4I
Read a BBC obituary here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21898664
Read the New York Times obit here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/world/africa/chinua-achebe-nigerian-writer-dies-at-82.html?_r=0
NPR obit here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/22/175025166/chinua-achebe-nigerian-author-of-things-fall-apart-dies
Photo: Video still, Achebe at the New York State Writers Institute. Read More......
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Hemingway/PEN Award Goes to Teju Cole
The 2012 Hemingway/PEN Award was given this week to Teju Cole who visited the New York State Writers Institute on February 10th.
Teju Cole, writer in residence at Bard College, has won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, which honors outstanding first works of fiction, for his novel Open City. Previous winners of the prize include Bobbie Mason, Renata Adler, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri and Dagoberto Gilb. Read more in the New York Times.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Thieves Everywhere!
"Thieves abound in Lagos, and in this book. Every minute, every page is for the thief-- the pickpocket, the dubious petrol station attendant, the murderous armed robber, the compact disc pirate, the hostage-taking area boy, the bribe-taking police, customs and embassy officers, the thieving politician whose actions and inactions account for power failures and fuel scarcities... [all of it written] in prose that is at once precise and haunting, even long after the final word."
In the Guardian (UK), Tolu Ogunlesi reviewed Teju Cole's Every Day is For the Thief (2007), a novella with photographs about life in Lagos, Nigeria. Cole visits tomorrow 2/10.
Picture: Oil pirates clash with oil companies in the Niger delta.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
In Search of America
The plotless (and widely acclaimed) novel Open City by Teju Cole (who visits Friday 2/10) is essentially a meandering story about meanderings.
At one point the Nigerian-American narrator visits an immigration detention center in Queens and meets a young Liberian man who has long nurtured dreams of emigrating to America.
The Liberian has undertaken an arduous journey from Liberia to Mali to Morocco to Spain to Portugal, gradually saving up enough money to purchase a false passport and fly to JFK airport in New York City. The narrator hears his story from behind a wall of plexiglass.
"The man who sat in front of me had a broad white smile. He was young, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, as were all the other inmates. I introduced myself, and he smiled immediately and asked if I was African. He was as good-looking, as striking in appearance as any man I had ever seen. He had delicate cheekbones, a dark, even complexion, and the whites of his eyes were as vivid as his white teeth...."
To read more, buy the book.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Tweeting Lagos Nigeria
Inventing a new form of poetry, Teju Cole, who visits 2/10, continues to tweet his own versions of breaking headlines from Nigerian newspapers:
"The Lagos State Secretariat in Alausa is full of filthy creatures gorging themselves. But also, it has been invaded by rats."
"Angry at Olumide, of Igando, for not becoming a pastor, the Holy Spirit cursed him with kleptomania, with a sub-specialty in cars."
"While he was fetching firewood in Bauchi, persons unknown removed from Umar’s face both his eyes. He is understandably upset"
More tweets.
Picture: Lagos, Nigeria.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Headline Haiku
Teju Cole, who visits Friday, 2/10, has taken to tweeting headlines and stories from the Nigerian newspapers, reformulated as a kind of poetry. Another tweeter-blogger, based in Monrovia, Liberia, has categorized them as "totally brilliant and unique" Haiku remixes:
"In Calabar South, Inyang, refilling a kerosene lantern while its wick was lit, sent himself and two others into final darkness."
"The man whom the concerned citizens of Port Harcourt nearly lynched for turning a boy into a goat is now being interrogated by police."
“'Dr Collins Okafor,' not a doctor at all, worked at the General Hospital in Calabar for only a year before he was found out."
More on the Moved to Monrovia blog.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Nigerian Authors Look West
Yinka Ibukun of the Associated Press writes about Nigeria's impressive literary diaspora.
Featured authors include Teju Cole, who visits February 10 (Friday), as well as three past visitors to the Institute: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
"The chaos of Nigeria's largest city of Lagos gets boiled down to prose as a narrator notes 'how unpretty' its sprawl looks, with 'its unplanned houses sprouting like weeds.' Another author describes the madness of the commute, how six roads meet and 'there is no traffic light.'"....
More.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Photography vs. Writing
Teju Cole, who visits 2/10, talks with India Realtime about why photography beats literature:
"I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it’s because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph – luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.
In the case of literature, so much of what’s on the page is you really making an effort to put it there. So people can give you the credit for what you’ve written down and praise you for writing that sentence.
But in the case of photography, although it also takes a lot of preparation and work, it can give the illusion of chance, of magic: How did you make it happen? How did you happen to be there? And maybe that’s a reaction I’m much more at home with."
More.
Featured photo is from Teju Cole's website. See more of his work on Flickr.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)