The Lost Daughter Collective
(Dzanc Books, 2017)
Every woman was once a girl and every girl was once a daughter. For every woman in the world, there will always be laughter in slaughter.
Midnight at the Institute. Using bedtime stories as cautionary tales, a Wrist Scholar tells his only child of the Lost Daughter Collective: a fabled group of bereaved fathers who meet in an abandoned umbrella factory to mourn the loss of their girls. Over everything hangs the mystery of the Archivist’s daughter―neither dead nor missing, but indisputably gone. Blurring the line between reality and artifice, far past and near future, Drager’s satirical exploration of gender politics and identity queers the old adage: “A son is a son ’til he finds himself a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life.”
Translated into Italian by Giorgia Demuro as Perdute le figlie (Zona 42, 2025)
Translated into Spanish by Susana Arroyo as El círculo de las hijas perdidas (Aristas Martínez Ediciones, 2021)
Winner of a 2017 Shirley Jackson Award for Novella
Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Excerpted at Lit Hub
An interview at Tupelo Quarterly
A review from Kirkus
A review at Publisher’s Weekly
Other reviews at: The Rumpus; Quarterly West; Black Warrior Review; Colorado Review