Lindsey Drager

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.

Stories

The Archive of Alternate Endings

L'archivio dei finali alternativi

A group of aging librarians must decide whether to fight or flee from the end of print and the rise of electronic publication, while the parents of a young girl who died in front of the library struggle with their role in her loss. Anchored by the transposed stories of a photographer and his deaf mathematician lover, each mourning the other's death, The Sorrow Proper illustrated how humans of all relations--lovers, parents, colleagues--cope with and challenge social "progress," a mechanism that requires we ignore, and ultimately forget, the residual in order to make room for the new, to tell a story that resists "The End."

The Sorrow Proper

"Using bedtime stories as cautionary tales, a Wrist Scholar relays the story of a fabled group of fathers coping with dead and missing daughters. When the girl sacrifices everything to send a final message to her father through her art and one lost girl is revealed to be not dead or missing but a daughter who has transitioned into a son, fathers are faced with the reality that their children's "play" is anything but. Caught in a strange loop that-like Escher's "Drawing Hands"-confuses the line between reality and artifice, folklore and scholarship, far past and near future, The Lost Daughter Collective illustrates how the stories we receive are shaped by those who do the telling. A story about the complex relationship between fathers and daughters as well as the ethics of storytelling, The Lost Daughter Collective is a gothic fairy tale fusing the fabulism at work in Donald Barthleme and Ben Marcus with the brevity and language play of Rikki Ducornet and Jenny Offill to raise questions about agency and authorship in our narratives"--

The Lost Daughter Collective

Matthew Gavin Frank

Man Martin

Kat Meads

Alison Townsend

Elizabeth Jackson

Wendell Mayo

B. J. Best

Saudamini Siegrist

Gary L. McDowell

Geeta Kothari

Christopher Ankney

Carol Hamilton

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Maggie Kennedy

Ann Pelletier

Squire Babcock

Charles Haverty

Judith Hertog

Tara Mae Mulroy

Gretchen VanWormer

Zone 3

At once an ode to birds, an elegy to space, and a journey into the most haunted and uncanny corners of the human mind, The Avian Hourglass showcases Lindsey Drager's signature brilliance in a stunning, surrealist novel for fans of Jesse Ball, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, and Shirley Jackson The birds have disappeared. The stars are no longer visible. The Crisis is growing worse. In a town as isolated as a snowglobe, a woman who dreams of becoming a radio astronomer struggles to raise the triplets she gave birth to as a gestational surrogate, whose parents were killed in a car accident. Surrounded by characters who wear wings, memorize etymologies, and build gigantic bird nests, and bound to this town in which young adults must decide between two binary worldviews--either YES or NO--the woman is haunted by the old fable of the Girl in Glass Vessel, a cautionary tale about prying back the façade of one's world. When events begin to unfold that suggest a local legend about the town being the whole of the universe might be true, the woman finds her understanding of her own life-and her reality-slipping through her fingers. A reflection on the intersecting crises of mental health, the climate emergency, political polarization, and the exponentially growing reliance on technology, The Avian Hourglass culminates in a figurative and literal twist that asks readers to reframe how they conceive of a series of concentric understandings of home: the globe, one's country, one's town, one's family, and one's own body.

The Avian Hourglass

Robert Lopez

Matt Bell

Patty Yumi Cottrell

Sarah Rose Etter

Tom Whalen

Jessica Alexander

Meghan Privitello

Alan Sondheim

C. Dylan Bassett

A. T. Grant

Emma Sovich

Joseph Aguilar

N. Michelle AuBuchon

Ruth Baumann

Eric Lloyd Blix

Trevor Calvert

Hunter Choate

Benjamin Clemenzi-Allen

Jon Cone

Stella Corso

Tim Earley

Knar Gavin

Pamela Gesualdi

Lindsay Herko

Matthew Mahaney

Elizabeth Mikesch

Thirii Myint

Eleanor Perry

W. R. Porter

Jessica Richardson

Boyd Spahr

Adam Strauss

Sara Veglahn

The eleventh issue of Caketrain, featuring new work from Joseph Aguilar, Jessica Alexander, N. Michelle AuBuchon, C Dylan Bassett, Ruth Baumann, Matt Bell, Eric Lloyd Blix, Trevor Calvert, Hunter Choate, Benjamin Clemenzi-Allen, Jon Cone, Stella Corso, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Lindsey Drager, Tim Earley, Sarah Rose Etter, Knar Gavin, Pamela Gesualdi, A.T. Grant, Lindsay Herko, Robert Lopez, Matthew Mahaney, Elizabeth Mikesch, Muxxi, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Eleanor Perry, W.R. Porter, Meghan Privitello, Jessica Richardson, Alan Sondheim, Emma Sovich, Boyd Spahr, Adam Strauss, Sara Veglahn, Tom Whalen. Edited by Amanda Raczkowski, Joseph Reed, Tanner Hadfield and Katy Mongeau.

Caketrain

Lindsey Drager

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