Tony Woodlief | Author

Fiction and Creative Writing

This is the artsy section of the website, the place where Tony puts on a French beret and really lets it all hang out. Fiction, metafiction, creative non-fiction, non-fiction masquerading as fiction but written cleverly enough to avoid libel charges—it’s all here for your enjoyment.

We Shall Not All Sleep is a captivating coming-of-age story woven with danger, mystery, and the bonds between father and son, husband and wife, and faithful friends. It is a haunting tale of a quest, enduring love, and the price of redemption.”

Read the full description here.

Listen to the soundtrack here.

Buy the book at B&NAmazon, or if you want to support independent booksellers, at Bookshop. If you buy directly from Slant Books, you’ll be supporting a non-profit publisher dedicated to printing beautiful work that doesn’t fit the algorithms of Big Publishing.

 

 

Early reviews of We Shall Not All Sleep

We Shall Not All Sleep is an emotionally charged, beautifully written portrait of a father and son’s deep love for each other, and of the guilt and hauntings, both real and imagined, that threaten and challenge them. It’s very thoughtful and very fine.

Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy

Tony Woodlief has written an incantatory novel that seeps into your heart and will not let you go. We Shall Not All Sleep asks essential questions. When the present and past break you, when hauntings won’t release you, when mysteriously dark forces whisper in the wind, what do you do? The novel’s answer will shake you to your core, will make you wiser, will inspire you to believe in the power of love again, and will—as all great books do—change you. These characters and their lives—so human, so flawed, so beautiful—will stay with you long after the final page is turned.

Connie May Fowler, Author of Before Women had Wings

 

Tony Woodlief’s work is the unvarnished, resolute, hardwood prose of a man who writes with a determined honesty—as if he is staking ground in a battle; as if God is staring him in the face and he dare write nothing less. To read him is as bracing as it is rewarding.

A.G. Harmon, author of A House All Stilled

Norbert Pearlroth Might Have Been a LawyerReckon Review, July 2024

The Dragon Can’t Eat You When You’re DancingImage, Spring 2024

This is How You Will Heal the WoundClose Reading, September 21, 2020

The Confession of a Rebellious Literary CitizenClose Reading, July 30, 2020

The SubdivisionClose Reading, June 29, 2020

RevivalDappled Things, 2014

Tony Woodlief Author and Writer
Tony Woodlief_3

ElectiveImage, Summer 2012

Stripping the Fat off Reality, Good Letters, September 2011

Monster Mashup: How Our Culture’s Heroes and Villains Have Traded Places,” chapter in Acculturated, 2011

The Glass ChildRuminate, Summer 2009

NameImage, Summer 2008

The Grace I KnowRuminate, Summer 2007

Fiction

Parenting

Politics

Appearances

Politics

Fiction

Parenting

Appearances