Praise for Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"The Rumpus, "Most Anticipated Books of (early) 2024"Bookshop.org "100 Most Anticipated Books of 2024"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 "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 "Danielle Dutton's collection
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is modern creative nonfiction at its best, a collection of original and inventive pieces that defy literary categorization."
--David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy "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 "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 2016IPPY 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
