Afterlife
Available March 15, 2026 from Fiction Collective Two
Advance praise for Afterlife:
“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 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
“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
“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
“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
“Angela’s Woodward’s Afterlife gives gorgeous, gritty substance to the ‘rough base’ that art floats on. Bad chemicals, bad policies, bad literature, bad relationships, bad choices, bad faith, bad feelings, and bad thoughts—none of it escapes acute observation, especially the muck of the writer narrator’s feelings about her hapless, recently deceased sister. The resulting story is beautifully constructed, deeply intelligent and thoroughly rooted in the pain and disorder of existing, now. Afterlife eats life’s trash and transcends it, too.”
—Elisabeth Sheffield, author Ire Land: A Faery Tale, Helen Keller Really Lived, Fort Da: A Report, and Gone
Ink
New Poetry & Prose series from University Press of Kentucky
” …this novel curses all cleansers, all fresheners, all distractions, all entertainment, willing our national stains to set. Reading this book…it’s like I’d forgotten novels could be provocative.
—Joe Sacksteder, author of Make/Shift and Driftless Quintet
Order from Bookshop or wherever you get your books
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