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.”
With allusions to
Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz,
and
Peter Pan, The Lost Daughter Collective
is a gothic fairy tale fusing the fabulism of Donald Barthleme and Ben Marcus with the language play of Rikki Ducornet and Jenny Offill.