Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

The Millions, “Most Anticipated Books 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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

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

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.