On Teju Cole

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

- James Wood, The New Yorker

Why hyphens are important

as proven, here, admittedly, by omission:

Two star novelists, Nathan Englander and Zadie Smith, on bringing back wrong and right, micro and macro writing, and David Foster Wallace

- Guernica

Though how they think they're going to bring back David Foster Wallace...

Me, me, me - not you

Generally we refuse to be each other.

- Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: occasional essays

And quite right too.

The perils of self-awareness

What have we become when we 'understand' ourselves so well that all our questions are rhetorical?

- Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: occasional essays

What indeed.

[NB It is not clear to me whether the above is a rhetorical question. (Or the one above that.)]