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About The Archive Of Alternate Endings
Product Description "Captivating...Drager’s plot is ambitious and emotionally resonant, making for a clever, beguiling novel." ―Publishers Weekly starred review Tracking the evolution of Hansel and Gretel at seventy-five-year intervals that correspond with earth’s visits by Halley’s Comet, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold. In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg’s sister uses the tale as a surrogate for sharing a family secret only her brother believes. In 1835, The Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm revise the tale to bury a truth about Jacob even he can’t come to face. In 1986, a folklore scholar and her brother come to find the record is wrong about the figurative witch in the woods, while in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth's sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code. Breadcrumbing back in time from 2365 to 1378, siblings reimagine, reinvent, and recycle the narrative of Hansel and Gretel to articulate personal, regional, and ultimately cosmic experiences of tragedy. Through a relay of speculative pieces that oscillate between eco-fiction and psychological horror, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores sibling love in the face of trauma over the course of a millennium, in the vein of Richard McGuire's Here and Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Review "A philosophical book ... beautiful in its conception." ―Kirkus Reviews "Unapologetically Borgesian, at once a library of Babel and a garden of forking paths, but its ideas hold meaning because real people live and die by them, caught up in spirals of shame and compassion, always on the verge of―but never quite tipping over into―understanding." ―Arkansas International "[A] taut, deeply philosophical retelling...This is a profoundly resonating book that will feel both dense and light." ―Historical Novel Society "Although relatively slim, Drager’s novel is a vast and convoluted treasure trove. She does a fine job of illuminating the darker concepts and human relationships with her rich, confident, and sometimes startling writing. Reading The Archive of Alternate Endings is an enriching literary experience the reader will remember hauntingly ever after." ―Philly.com "A leaner, tighter, more emotionally impactful take on connectedness and purpose and the immensity of existence than David Mitchell created with Cloud Atlas––done in a quarter of the pages, with a more sincere, human touch. There isn’t a grand conspiracy or plot here. This is a book about life. The result is a bold novel that challenges the idea of storytelling, time, identity, love, family, and history. Someone once told me that the best books haven’t been written yet. This one has." ―Barrelhouse "There is something both nihilistic and deeply hopeful in Drager's looping novel. Nihilistic, because in so many ways it indicates that as parts of a continuum of human storytelling, life, love, and hate, none of us matter; but hopeful because that continuum means our stories are related, our narratives interlocking, and so while we may be insignificant, we are also never alone." ―NPR "Drager has developed somewhat of a cult following her previous books...and for good reason―her writing is hypnotic. ... With themes of sibling love, queerness, time and space, and the earthly, this is an engrossing and poetic read." ―Brooklyn Rail "A poetic investigation of queerness and a philosophical meditation on the mercurial nature of stories...Weaving together fairytale archetypes, astronomical phenomena and queer history, The Archive of Alternate Endings is a uniquely rewarding balance between literary experimentation and human emotion, whilst remaining a riddling sphinx of a book." ―The Quietus " The Archive of Alternate Endings will lead you into uncanny forests both primordial and new, where storytellers forage and banished children roam. Cosmically expansive and poignantly intimate, Lindsey Drager
