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.