Forest of A Thousand Daemons

National Print Campaign: Send review copies/pitch to the following publications: General interest: Bomb, LA Times, NY Review of Books, NYTBR, Harper's, The Nation, The Believer, Bookforum, Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, SF Chronicle, Guardian UK, Toronto Globe & Mail, Miami Herald, New Republic, New Yorker, Rain Taxi, Bloomsbury Review, Village Voice, Wall St Journal, Washington Post, Associated Press, Oregonian, NY Magazine, Vanity Fair, Utne Spiritual interest: Smithsonian Mag, The Sun Magazine, Parabola World lit & translation interest: World Literature Today, Complete Review, Two Lines, Three Percent, Alta Translation Review, Salonica World Lit, African Literature Today, African Arts (MIT), Journal of the African Literature Association Trade publications: PW, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist Online & Social Media Campaign: Pursue reviews in: Words Without Borders, Guernica, Writers No One Reads (blog focusing on world lit), Molossus Promote on social media and the City Lights blog: City Lights has more than 16,700 Facebook fans & over 26,000 Twitter followers. Excerpts in: Will pursue translation & world lit journals: eXchanges Journal of Literary Translation (University of Iowa), Metamorphoses (Smith College), Asymptote (dedicated to lit translation) Endorsements: Will pursue blurbs from Teju Cole, Ben Okri, Helen Oyeyemi, Nathaniel Mackey, Chris Abani and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The first novel written in the Yoruba language and one of the first to be written in any African language."His total conviction in multiple existences within our physical world is as much an inspiration to some of the most brilliant fiction in Yoruba writing as it is a deeply felt urge to 'justify the ways of God to man.'"--Wole Soyinka, translator and Nobel Laureate A classic work of African literature, Forest of a Thousand Daemons is the first novel to be written in the Yoruba language. First published in Nigeria in 1939, it is one of that country's most revered and widely read works, and its influence on Nigerian literature is profound, most notably in the works of Amos Tutuola. A triumph of the mythic imagination, the narrative unfolds in a landscape where, true to Yoruba cosmology, human, natural, and supernatural beings are compellingly and wonderfully alive at once: a world of warriors, sages and kings; magical trees and snake people; spirits, Ghommids, and bog-trolls. Here are the adventures of Akara-ogun--son of a brave warrior and wicked witch--as he journeys into the forest, encountering and dealing with all-too-real unforeseen forces, engaging in dynamic spiritual and moral relationships with personifications of his fate, projections of the terrors that haunt man. Distinguished Nobel Prize--winning author Wole Soyinka offers a supple and elegant translation and provides an essay on the special challenges of translating Fagunwa from the Yoruba into English, along with a glossary of Yoruba and unfamiliar words. With illustrations by acclaimed Nigerian printmaker Bruce Onobrakpeya. Daniel Orowole Fagunwa was born in western Nigeria in 1903. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1963. Praise for Forest of a Thousand Daemons: "A deep tale of the spirit; a classic of the African imagination."--Ben Okri "Fagunwa is as important to the Nigerian imagination as Grimm's tales to the Western imagination. Except that Fagunwa's book is not a collection of oral tales, but an original modern novel, one that sets out to test the limits of the form of the novel, the range of myth and its overlap into daily life. Soyinka offers us not a simple translation but a complex and truly respectful re-rendering. With this tender touch by Soyinka, Fagunwa's book comes alive - reanimated in this...