Ink - Hardcover

by Angela Woodward (Author)

"We have extensive accounts, typed out neatly: 'They took me into a dark room and started hitting me on the head and stomach and legs. I stayed in this room for 5 days, naked, with no clothes.'"

Angela Woodward's novel Ink tells the story of the two women who spend their days doing that neat typing. Sylvia and Marina, both single mothers, work in a suburban office building, transcribing tape recordings of witness statements describing detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. Their ordinary preoccupations--problems with the soap in the restroom, the motives of Marina's new love, Mr. Right, and Sylvia's worries about paying for her son's show choir costume--are a mundane backdrop to the violence represented by the transcripts.

Woodward layers essayistic explorations of the history of ink and writing materials into the women's tale along with the story of the unfinished masterpiece of a French poet, and a writer's notations about her daily commute and the lake behind her house. Then a new crime is revealed. Ink is an illuminating meditation on what it means to bear witness.

Author Biography

Angela Woodward is the author of the novels End of the Fire Cult and Natural Wonders. Natural Wonders won the Fiction Collective Two Doctorow Innovative Fiction prize in 2015. Rain Taxi called it "a wide-ranging meditative book that is by turns delightful, clever, and heartbreaking." Woodward's short fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and been anthologized in Dzanc Books' Best of the Web. She has published stories and essays in many journals, including the Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Los Angeles Review of Books, and American Chordata.