Overview

"From the ""strikingly smart and daringly feminist"" (Jenny Offill) author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a prose collection like no other, where different styles of writing and different spaces of experience create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. ""Luminous"" (The Guardian) and ""brilliantly odd"" (The Irish Independent), Danielle Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling. In the four eponymous sections of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. ""Prairie"" is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest. ""Dresses"" offers a surprisingly moving portrait of literary fashions. ""Art"" turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction might relate to one another, a question central to the whole book; while the final section, ""Other,"" includes pieces of irregular (""other"") forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious and heartbreaking by turns. Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness, and indefinable beauty."

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9781566897037

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Reviews

"Praise for Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other ""Pieces included in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other are not short stories or essays in the strict (and limited) sense, but spells, incantatory hallucinations, organically shared phantasmagoria, bodily immersions in materials worldly and other-wordly. It is a book and yet it is definitely way more: a field of irruptions. This is Dutton at her best yet."" --Cristina Rivera Garza ""Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. Her growing body of work is among the most formally inventive (and therefore essential) I can think of, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a vital, enlivening addition to it."" --Kate Briggs ""I know it sounds absurd, but I am fairly certain that some undiscovered, hallucinogenic essence is working through Danielle Dutton's surreal and disorienting prose because the prairie I thought I knew is not, I now realize, the prairie I know at all. ¡Carajo! Whatever chaos or existential doubt is unearthed by these uncanny and highly stylized contemporary parables deserves to be played out. This book is so wild--I'm obsessed."" --Lara Mimosa Montes Past Praise: Praise for SPRAWL Finalist for the Believer Book Award, 2011 ""Danielle Dutton's unnamed narrator stalks through yards, streets, and her own house with such sharp perception that everything she encounters--cake trays, the doorbell's ring, a dead body--becomes an object in her vast and impeccable still-life. Dutton's sentences are as taut and controlled as her narrator's mind, and a hint at what compels both ('I locate my body by grounding it against the bodies of others') betrays a fierce and feral searching. SPRAWL makes suburban landscapes thrilling again."" --The Believer Book Award, Editors' Shortlist Praise for Margaret the First Literary Hub Best Book of 2016 IPPY Gold Medal for Historical Fiction, 2017 ""Dutton's remarkable second novel is as vividly imaginative as its subject, the seventeenth century English writer and eccentric Margaret Cavendish . . . . Reminiscent of Woolf's Orlando in its sensuous appreciation of the world and unconventional approach to fictionalized biography. Dutton's boldness, striking prose, and skill at developing an idiosyncratic narrative should introduce her to the wider audience she deserves."" --Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Ms. Dutton's style is tightly poetic. 'It was indescribable what she wanted, ' she writes of Margaret. 'She wanted to be 30 people. . . . To live as nature does, in many ages, in many brains.'"" --John Williams, The New York Times ""A strikingly smart and daringly feminist novel with modern insights into love, marriage, and the siren call of ambition."" --Jenny Offill"

Author Information

Danielle Dutton's previous books are Margaret the First, SPRAWL, and Attempts at a Life. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, BOMB, The White Review, and NOON. Dutton teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis and is the cofounder and editor of Dorothy, a publishing project. Born and raised in California, she has lived on the (former) prairie for nearly twenty years.

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