In Black Paper Teju Cole meditates on what it means to keep our humanity--and witness the
humanity of others--in a time of darkness. Darkness Cole writes is not empty. Through art
politics travel and memoir he returns us to the wisdom latent in shadows and sets the
darkness echoing. The opening essay sets the mood for the book as Cole travels to southern
Italy and Sicily to view a series of Caravaggio paintings. He ponders the suffering that
Caravaggio (a murderer a slaveholder a terror and a pest) both dealt out and experienced
and the disquieting echoes of that suffering in the abandoned boats of migrants arriving on
nearby shores. This collection also gathers several of Cole's recent columns on photography for
the New York Times Magazine and offers a suite of elegies to lost friends who show him--and
us--ways of mourning in times of death--
