Afterlife

"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

"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 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