All the things

Novelist Teju Cole has also developed a following as a critic of art and photography. In Known and Strange Things (Random House, $17) Cole’s first work of nonfiction, there are 50 short critical essays on practically everything, but always focused on the relationship of ideas, history and art to the present place and time. The writing is also always aware of the relationship of blackness to a white culture. Divided into sections titled “Reading Things,” “Seeing Things,” “Being Here” and “Epilogue,” each essay contains Cole’s trademark poetic insights, the kind of thinking about the past and its relationship to the here and now that has garnered him an ever-growing following. In one, he writes, “The black body comes prejudged, and as a result it is placed in needless jeopardy,” and we know that simple truth has been with us always, but we still lean forward to see what he’s going to tell us next.