Chris Abani, Nigerian-born author, newly installed Chicagoan, and professor of English at Northwestern University, is on the same page with:
Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole I really love this book, which is about the city of Lagos, but really it’s a book about home and homecoming. [The narrator] is born in Nigeria, in Lagos, and then immigrates to America when he’s a child and spends a lot of his adult life here. The book is an extended essay about his first return in almost 20 years. It’s a beautiful work because it’s not just prose but also features amazing photographs by Cole—not documentary images but these strangely arty, black-and-white photographs that are more evocative than descriptive. They totally echo the writing style, which is almost like travel writing—similar to the way Pico Iyer writes. There’s a real melancholy and poetic impulse here that you don’t find in most travel books because usually the writers don’t have this much of a personal investment. I just moved from LA to Chicago five months ago to take up a job here and have been feeling very displaced. This book is a comfort because it’s all about displacement, but about the comfort one can find in displacement.
