Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

by Danielle Dutton

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566897037
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	04/23/2024
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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 Universityin 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.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction
A Document Top Read of 2024
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024
A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of (early) 2024
A Bookshop.org Most Anticipated Book of 2024
A Millions Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2024

“A shimmering and perplexing work that challenges the constraints of traditional prose… Highbrow while remaining mischievously playful, reminiscent of the form-smashing thrills of writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Relentlessly surprising and thoroughly original, this dazzles.” —Publishers Weekly

“Divided into the title’s four rubrics, the volume still permits us to glide across and through disparate subjects and forms eased by Dutton’s serenely discerning voice, one so studded with alert perceptions that the book possesses a poetic density belying its slender size.” —Albert Mobilio, 4Columns

“How the world has changed since the Brontë sisters wrote of long walks over the moors, or Virginia Woolf of flowers, trees, water, sky. The texture of those writers is all over these pages, and you can almost hear Dutton talking to them, saying, Look what’s happened! Saying, Is there a future?” —Deb Olin Unferth, The Believer

"This is one everyone will be talking about." —Emily Firetog, Literary Hub

“Dutton’s work is always formally inventive, refreshingly ambitious, and totally brilliant.” —The Millions

“[Dutton stitches] together recurring dreams, real and imagined botanical terms, and dialogue from novels and films to create a tapestry of the desolation of modern life and the flimsiness of our protections against environmental collapse.” —Helen Hill, The Rumpus

"You’re never sure whether Dutton is still on the outside, or getting at the narrator’s anxiety within. But that uncertainty feels part of this project, which gives us not just a cycle of stylishly observed stories but also, midway through, the tools to read them." —Lucy Thynne, The Telegraph

“It’s easy for one to assume that prairies might be the landscapes hiding inside Dutton herself. Like prairies, Dutton’s writing feels expansive, eternal, spreading out in all directions, far beyond you—far past any kind of vanishing point.” —Nikki Barnhart, The Journal

“Danielle Dutton, maskless hero of a lyrical avant-garde, has written a new book that is certain to challenge assumptions about contemporary American literature.” —Eric Bies, Open Letters Review

"A welcome addition to the boundary-resistant genre of 'weird little book.'" —Dan Irving, Annulet

“Writing ignites “a politics of attention” in Danielle Dutton’s literary, unconventional collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, whose entries are bound by energy, sharp awareness of the world’s dangers, family relationships, and the topic of writing itself.” —Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews

“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

“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

“This surreal, (in)sightful collection of essays and stories is riotous and sublime, a love letter to making art.” —Mairead Small Staid

“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

From the Publisher

★ 2024-01-30
A shimmering and perplexing work that challenges the constraints of traditional prose.

In her finely tempered collection of essays and experimental writing, Dutton, author of Margaret the First, explores a conceptual take on storytelling involving the ineffable feeling of a text, beyond mere words. Her work is highbrow while remaining mischievously playful, reminiscent of the form-smashing thrills of writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson. The first section, “Prairie,” features five abstract stories that eschew plot in favor of hazy, memoir-like fragments. The poetic and peculiar “Dresses” is an artfully arranged list of excerpts from poems and novels that include mentions of a dress. Despite the content coming from outside sources, their collaged curation transforms the texts into something unsuspectingly resonant. The revelatory essay in “Art” helps unlock Dutton’s puzzles. Here, she discusses contemporary art and the practice of ekphrastic writing, a technique that not only describes visual art in words but also aims to render in language and tone how a work makes a person feel. The author explains her interest in writing a text that can expand beyond its edges and open “a space within which we attend to the world.” “How might a story embody a specific way of looking?” she asks. “Other” further develops these ideas. In the short narrative “Not Writing,” Dutton briefly discusses the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin and how scholar Olivia Laing noted “they aren’t meant to be read, but are there to be responded to.” Dutton asks, “Is it wrong to want to write towards what isn’t intended to be read? What I want is a story that’s an object that can turn itself inside out.” The author not only introduces big ideas; she shows her readers how to grapple with her lofty questions.

An unassuming work of literary theory that will dazzle hungry scholars.

Kirkus Reviews