The Sorrow Proper — Lindsey Drager

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.