Description

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.

This hybrid literary collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create.

‘Prairie’ is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest, replete with wildflowers, ominous rivers, fireflies, cattle lowing and ghostly apparitions; ‘Dresses’ paints a wild and moving portrait of literary fashions; ‘Art’ is an imaginative illustrated essay which explores the relationship between fiction and visual art; and ‘Other’ offers an assemblage of irregular stories and essays that are hilarious or 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.

‘A shimmering and perplexing work that challenges the constraints of traditional prose.’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is an absorbing assemblage of surrealist prose threaded with deep unease. Danielle Dutton’s densely woven psychological landscapes render the world as strange, slippery, and surprising as some of us believe it to be.’ – Kathryn Scanlan

‘Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close… 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

‘In these essays and fictions, which are so attuned to textures, glimpses, and high contrasts between dark and bright spaces, Dutton proposes the book as ‘installation’, an invitation to remember what it’s like to move through linked spaces in the company of near-others. Proximity hurts, but it also amplifies sensation, the formidable and delicate orientations experienced in conditions with exits and entrances of many kinds. As Dutton writes: ‘Ostensibly I write novels and stories, yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots.’ At times, this proposition is a mode of impasse, the not-writing that is also writing, in the lineage of an experimental narrative tradition that prickles in the body first.’ – Bhanu Kapil

‘This is Dutton at her best yet.’ – Cristina Rivera Garza

‘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

‘Dutton’s lush and startling new collection reimagines familiar forms to show us how works of art can still unmoor us, help us reckon with all those losses and holes and glitches in what now passes for the real and powerfully insist on the strangeness of strange times.’ – Jennifer Hodgson

Danielle Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the prose collection Attempts at a Life, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and she wrote the text interpolations for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her fiction 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.

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