Teju Cole: Pharmakon
‘I am writing this note while you’re still asleep. It’s still early enough that I can open the windows in my room. By the time you read this, I’ll be at work. Please pardon the strange formality of writing to you when I could just have said to you in person what I want to say. But since I have failed to say it, it is reasonable to conclude that I am having some difficulty speaking.’
Bringing together a sequence of subtle and disquieting photographs with a dozen compact short stories, Pharmakon is a surprising new work from the singular mind of Teju Cole. The photographs were taken across the globe and extend the oblique point of view he developed in Fernweh (2020).
Interspersed among the images are texts that emerge like intimate signals from our age of crisis, mining further the exquisite linguistic control that characterizes Cole’s novels Open City (2011) and Tremor (2023). The result is a work of strange beauty that startles and consoles in equal measure.
About the Author
Teju Cole (b. 1975, Nigeria) is a writer, art historian, and photographer. He is the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. He is the author of three previous books. His novella, Every Day is for the Thief (2014), was named a book of the year by the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, NPR, and the Telegraph and shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His novel, Open City (2011) won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis. Open City was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. His essay collection, Known and Strange Things (2016), the core of which is his photography essays, was published to rave reviews in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, among others; named a book of the year by the Guardian, the Financial Times, Time Magazine, and many others; and is the only book to have been shortlisted for two PEN Awards in the same year: the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and the PEN/Jean Stein Award for originality, merit, and impact.
