This year's favorite Teju Cole read has over 300 years of history.Strange Tales from the Pavilion of Idleness"Pu Songling's The Last Supper is a masterpiece: the stories it tells are brilliant, dark, funny, and terrifying. There's nothing I've read in a long time that can compare." comments the author, who recently visited Barcelona to present his latest book of essays, Black paper (Acantilado, 2025).

It's been almost fifteen years since Teju Cole (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1975) published Open city –in Catalan in Quaderns Crema, translated by Xavier Pàmies–, an introspective and subtle novel about a boy who walks through contemporary New York and describes it with exquisite prose that is at the same time critical of the traces of racism and colonialism that can still be found in Cole1. Harvard, has visited Barcelona to present a new book, Black paper (Acantilado, 2025; Spanish translation by Miguel Temprano García). This collection of essays offers an intelligent and erudite tour of some of his many cultural interests: he devotes inspired pages to illuminating the painting of Caravaggio or to vindicating the shadows present in the paintings of Kerry James Marshall; he recalls his youthful interest in animals by asking whether black panthers exist or are an invention; he pays homage to one of his grandmothers; he remembers Edward Said, author ofOrientalism and defender of the Palestinian cause; he also explains how, since arriving in the United States from Nigeria at almost 18 years old, he began to define himself as "African".