Overview

A kaleidoscopic meditation on grief, memory, and the uncanny, where dreams, histories, and forgotten encyclopedias blur the line between life and afterlife. In this luminous novel, Angela Woodward chronicles the meaning of death, the illusions of truth, and the strange, shimmering persistence of the self beyond the ordinary boundaries of life. Through fictional encyclopedia entries, surreal vignettes, and personal narratives, Afterlife blurs fact and imagination, the material and the ghostly, with poetic precision and biting wit. Woodward's speaker journeys through museums of bird art, cults and conformity, environmental chemicals, and lost loves. What emerges is an elegiac, deeply intelligent inquiry into how we continue to haunt the world—and how the world haunts us back. A work of literary art that will appeal to readers of experimental fiction, creative nonfiction, and lyric essay, Afterlife invites comparison to writers like Jenny Boully, W. G. Sebald, and Anne Carson. This book is ideal for readers drawn to feminist, hybrid, and formally inventive literature; for those fascinated by the interplay between language and grief; and for anyone who has ever felt the uncanny persistence of the past in corners of the present.

Full Product Details

9781573662161

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Angela Woodward has fashioned an uncanny and dazzling new reference book that will leave readers entirely spellbound. Afterlife is its own universe populated with animals, vegetables, minerals, heavy metals, dead sisters, dead writers, and a fearless narrator who holds nothing back."" --Robert Lopez, author of The Best People ""Each of Afterlife's chapters is an entry in a highly compressed, highly unorthodox encyclopedia of the 'preposterous spectacle of civilization.' Everything that has always drawn me to Angela Woodward's fiction--her dry wit, iceberg prose, and especially her imaginative meanders, digressions, and explorations--is on spectacular display here."" --Marcus Pactor, author of Begat Who Begat Who Begat ""Angela Woodward has written a gorgeously encyclopedic elegy to a lost sister that rebuilds her through curious meditations on everything from cadmium poisoning to industrial bug farms to umbrella enthusiast clubs. Woodward's acerbic masterpiece probes the capacity of dead art to capture the flicker of something like a ghost, like a beetle wing, an act of dissection that reveals those delicate moments when longing hardens into poetry."" --Tina May Hall, author of The Snow Collectors and The Physics of Imaginary Objects ""Angela Woodward's Afterlife . . . is beautifully constructed, deeply intelligent, and thoroughly rooted in the pain and disorder of existing, now."" --Elisabeth Sheffield, author Ire Land: A Faery Tale, Helen Keller Really Lived, Fort Da: A Report, and Gone ""Afterlife is a wonder. With the moxie of Renata Adler, the curiosity of Maggie Nelson, and the wit of Deborah Levy, Angela Woodward has turned the screw of storytelling in the best of ways. This novel is a riveting encyclopedia of the imagination."" --Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe and other fictions ""Woodward renders the ephemeral in small, heavy, valuable objects. Afterlife is a curation of the most perfect historical and cultural iterations--for a museum of an unnamed domain."" --John Reed, author of A Still Small Voice, Snowball's Chance, The Whole, All the World's a Grave, and Tales of Woe ""Sharp, spare, elegant. Woodward has created a catalog of the American consciousness. Her clarity is breathtaking. Afterlife is a triumph of the imagination."" --Cara Hoffman, author of Running and RUIN

""Afterlife is a wonder. With the moxie of Renata Adler, the curiosity of Maggie Nelson, and the wit of Deborah Levy, Angela Woodward has turned the screw of storytelling in the best of ways. This novel is a riveting encyclopedia of the imagination."" --Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe and other fictions ""Woodward renders the ephemeral in small, heavy, valuable objects. Afterlife is a curation of the most perfect historical and cultural iterations--for a museum of an unnamed domain."" --John Reed, author of A Still Small Voice, Snowball's Chance, The Whole, All the World's a Grave, and Tales of Woe ""Sharp, spare, elegant. Woodward has created a catalog of the American consciousness. Her clarity is breathtaking. Afterlife is a triumph of the imagination."" --Cara Hoffman, author of Running and RUIN ""Angela Woodward has fashioned an uncanny and dazzling new reference book that will leave readers entirely spellbound. Afterlife is its own universe populated with animals, vegetables, minerals, heavy metals, dead sisters, dead writers, and a fearless narrator who holds nothing back."" --Robert Lopez, author of The Best People ""Each of Afterlife's chapters is an entry in a highly compressed, highly unorthodox encyclopedia of the 'preposterous spectacle of civilization.' Everything that has always drawn me to Angela Woodward's fiction--her dry wit, iceberg prose, and especially her imaginative meanders, digressions, and explorations--is on spectacular display here."" --Marcus Pactor, author of Begat Who Begat Who Begat ""Angela Woodward has written a gorgeously encyclopedic elegy to a lost sister that rebuilds her through curious meditations on everything from cadmium poisoning to industrial bug farms to umbrella enthusiast clubs. Woodward's acerbic masterpiece probes the capacity of dead art to capture the flicker of something like a ghost, like a beetle wing, an act of dissection that reveals those delicate moments when longing hardens into poetry."" --Tina May Hall, author of The Snow Collectors and The Physics of Imaginary Objects

Author Information

Angela Woodward is author of the novels Ink, Natural Wonders, and End of the Fire Cult, as well as two collections of short fiction.

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