Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton

DESCRIPTION

From the "strikingly smart and daringly feminist" (Jenny Offill) author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a 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 a protean as it is beguiling. In the four eponymous sections of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other Duttons 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. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DANIELLE DUTTON is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the prose collection Attempts of a Life, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and the text interpolations for Richard Kraft's Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Harper's, BOMB, and NOON. Dutton teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is cofounder and editor of the award-winning feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Born and raised in California, she has lived on the former prairie now for roughly twenty years. 

PRAISE

"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-worldly. It is a book and yet it is definitely way more: a field of interruptions. This is Dutton at her best yet." — Cristina Rivera Garza

"Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close, marveling at how her writing combines such extraordinary acts of precision, drawing forth strangeness and new presentations of beauty, with her own singular and searching, expansive style and intelligence. 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 intoxicating 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

DETAILS

Paperback | 169 pages