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The Archive of Alternate Endings
The Archive of Alternate Endings
The Archive of Alternate Endings
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The Archive of Alternate Endings

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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.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherDzanc Books
Release dateMay 7, 2019
ISBN9781950539055
The Archive of Alternate Endings
Author

Lindsey Drager

Lindsey Drager is the author of The Sorrow Proper, winner of the 2016 Binghamton University / John Gardner Fiction Award, and The Lost Daughter Collective, which tied for first in the novella category of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Awards. Originally from Michigan, Drager is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the College of Charleston, where she teaches in the MFA program in fiction. Her work has been published in prominent venues including Web Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, West Branch Wired, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, and Kenyon Review Online.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautifully, beautifully written. Drager has a way of sucking one in with her prose, and I felt like I was right there, witnessing each moment, even as they were simultaneously playing out through various eras. I was able to pull astounding revelations and reflections about the human experience. Must read.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I gave up on this book about halfway through it. I couldn't follow it, couldn't understand it, grew frustrated that I was missing whatever it was the author was trying to say, or show. I was willing to give it a chance -- it seemed like it would be an interesting book -- but in the end I just couldn't appreciate it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    We've all read fairy tales. In fact, there's an accepted, most common version of the fairy tales we know today, versions that are most likely aggregates of the various once oral versions. The Grimm brothers, in collecting the stories they did, determined how we know them (at least until Disney sanitized them) today. How did they choose which versions to tell? Were there variants they left out, ignored? Lindsey Drager, in her ambitious and unconventional novel The Archive of Alternate Endings, delves into the story of Hansel and Gretel, what the Grimms chose to include and exclude, and how this deceptively simple tale continues to inform stories throughout centuries, checking in every 75 years or so by riding the tail of Halley's Comet through time.Braiding the narratives of different people from 1378 to 2365, Drager repeats the themes of homosexuality, siblings, love, and the power of story--who tells them and how their choices shape not just the stories but the ideas of the people who hear them. The narrative spans a thousand years from ancient times into the future and then loops back on itself. Like Hansel and Gretel in the woods, the reader follows a path into the story and just when they think they are lost, Drager leaves clues to lead them back to understanding. Images are repeated from century to century, telling to telling, linking the stories, spiraling out from the central tale of Hansel and Gretel and the variant the Grimms chose not to tell as much as the one they did. This is a quick read but not an easy one because the unconventional narrative feels unmoored and unconnected in the beginning, only coming into tight clarity as the story progresses. Those who are not wedded to a traditional novel and want to push their understanding of story will find much to work through here.

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The Archive of Alternate Endings - Lindsey Drager

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