The Sorrow Proper
2015
First Published
3.87
Average Rating
184
Number of Pages
The Sorrow Proper is a novel-length investigation of the anxiety that accompanies change. A group of aging librarians must decide whether to fight or flee from the end of print and the rise of electronic publications, while the parents of the 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 attempts to illustrate 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." This debut novel explores the hypothetical end of the public library system and a young theory in the hard sciences called Many Worlds, a branch of quantum mechanics that strives to prove mathematically that our lives do not follow a singular, linear path. Lindsey Drager 's prose has appeared most recently in Web Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, West Branch Wired, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. A Michigan native, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver where she edits the Denver Quarterly .
Avg Rating
3.87
Number of Ratings
271
5 STARS
29%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
22%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
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.
