Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

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. —- ISBN: 9781566897037