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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Description: Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.
 Ainehi Edoro argues in Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2026) that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, kno...