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The Archive of Alternate Endings book cover
The Archive of Alternate Endings
2019
First Published
4.06
Average Rating
159
Number of Pages

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.

Avg Rating
4.06
Number of Ratings
1,917
5 STARS
40%
4 STARS
35%
3 STARS
18%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
2%
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Author

Lindsey Drager
Lindsey Drager
Author · 6 books

Her experimental novels have won a John Gardner Fiction Prize and a Shirley Jackson Award; been listed as a “Best Book of the Year” in The Guardian and NPR; and twice been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her work has received support from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Study, the I-Park Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. The recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, she is currently at work on two speculative multimedia projects.

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