The Lost Daughter Collective

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
"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