RaveNPREver since he moved to New York a little over 10 years ago, author Teju Cole knew that he wanted to write about the city, with the general structure of a character walking and walking around the metropolis and making discoveries ... The result is Open City, a debut novel that has met with high praise and is being called a new landmark in post-Sept. 11 fiction ... The central conflict of the book, Cole explains, is what happens to a mind that takes things in — and one that's sensitive to what's going on around it ... Julius exhibits that porous, open-minded quality by walking all over his adopted town simply to talk with strangers and learn their life stories ... Most of the people Julian talks to in the novel are immigrants, or at least somewhat culturally outside the mainstream.
