Lindsey Drager is the author of The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc, 2015), winner of the 2016 Binghamton University / John Gardner Fiction Award. Originally from Michigan, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the College of Charleston, where she teaches in the MFA program in fiction.
"An intelligent and densely layered story...a fleet and eerie
novel, like the last strand of dream before waking."
--Kirkus Reviews "The gorgeous language and urgent, controlled
voice spark a complicated and cerebral narrative that contains more
layers with each re-reading. ... The Lost Daughter Collective
serves as an excellent addition to the canon of modern fairy
tales."
--Black Warrior Review "A catalogue of paternal neglect reminiscent
of macabre German cautionary tales like Max und Moritz and Der
Struwwelpeter."
--Quarterly West The Lost Daughter Collective is a breathtaking
book, an examination of loss in all of its heartbreaking forms and
the stories that keep that loss alive. Drager's writing, the
crystalline beauty of her sentences, renders these stories that
much more wondrous. It's hard to accurately pinpoint just how she
makes this novel encompass both comfort and pain in such equal
measures, but I am grateful for its magic.
Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang The Lost Daughter
Collective is not subtly brilliant. Its brilliance washes over you
in waves, again and again, immersing you in the text and giving you
an experience of constant awe....Drager continues to be a force and
should be recognized widely for her work.
- The Rumpus Lindsey Drager boldly reinvents fairytales and evokes
dystopic futures. The Lost Daughter Collective casts a bizarre and
exquisite spell.
-Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat and Some
Possible Solutions Lindsey Drager's The Lost Daughter Collective
is, among other things, a stately and meticulous catalogue of
grief. It's not so much a narrative as an accumulation of
immaculate sentences and paragraphs that grow into a garment, a
body, an emersion. But most of all, it's an adventure of the
in-between, my favorite place in the whole world.
- Jim Krusoe, author of The Sleep Garden
Past Praise for The Sorrow Proper (Drager's) prose is elegant and
simple yet still capable of prodding readers to contemplate the
larger questions of our existence, and she excels at investing her
characters, even the nameless ones, with intimacy. A remarkable and
mature debut worthy of inclusion in all fiction collections; expect
to see it nominated for several fiction awards.
-Library Journal (starred review) [A] circuitous, ethereal and
captivating novel. Lindsey Drager's first, this is a thoroughly
satisfying book that delves artfully into the underside of human
lives.
-Tupelo Quarterly The garden-or perhaps the library courtyard-of
Lindsey Drager's wonderful first novel is replete with forked paths
that lead, with rigor and tenderness, into future pasts both bleak
and bright, curious dispensations where X either is or isn't the
number of bones on a plate. The Sorrow Proper is the exact opposite
of the seemingly endless novels published today that have so little
at stake; in it, mind, love, language, and culture are set to spin
on a surface so precarious it may have already collapsed. I read it
with wonder, and not a little fear, and emerged from the experience
feeling exhilarated.
-Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome Though much may have been written
about the displacement of paper and ink via electronic, The Sorrow
Proper crystalizes these concerns through the intersecting voices
librarians, a photographer, and a deaf mathematician, and does so
beautifully. The novel is part noir mystery, but one seen through a
lens ground by Italo Calvino, and part meditation on what a library
means in terms of actual lives, and how we destroy collections of
print books, both literal and metaphorical, at our peril. Lindsey
Drager's first novel is an exceptional voyage into these waters and
one that the reader will not want to end.
-Susan Daitch, author of The Colorist and L.C. Deft and moving, The
Sorrow Proper intricately explores the dynamics of loss, both
cultural and personal, and the way we as humans struggle through. A
smart and incisive first novel.
-Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife A hollow-like loss,
but anticipating absence's present, glass neither half empty nor
full, The Sorrow Proper makes a dent in the pillow where your
lover's head once lay. It's a story of silence framed, of libraries
emptying. Lindsey Drager frees the meaning of what isn't there.
-R. M. Berry, author of Dictionary of Modern Anguish Sorrow Proper
can feel like a math formula, sketched on a blank space (indeed, a
few pages feature empty rectangles), but it understands how those
numbers suggest the presence of eternity: a haunting, a
shaping.
-Story Towards Story In this hushed squall of a novel, Drager
offers a cautionary tale, a stirring love letter, and an
incantatory pleading with grief. In other words, The Sorrow Proper
resists classification, though surely it will be a welcome addition
to any (#RIP) card catalog.
-DIAGRAM In stark and unapologetic prose, presented more as fact
than as justification for the suffering of her characters, Drager
explores the deeper ends of sorrow. This is not a book that
glorifies or erases pain, but meets it full force on its own
terms.
-The Intentional The Sorrow Proper by Lindsey Drager is a quiet
novel of great precision and fine beauty that should be read
properly in a quiet library or improperly in a quiet bar surrounded
by a chorus of librarians who are mourning not just the shuttering
of their library but the loss of the book as it succumbs to digital
data.
-Necessary Fiction The novel's greatest achievement...is the unique
meditation it offers on grief.... The characters in The Sorrow
Proper each help readers understand that artistic creation is the
greatest act of heroism of all, if only for the axis it
provides.
-The Chattahoochee Review
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