Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other - Danielle Dutton

From the 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. Danielle Dutton's endlessly inventive books have been praised as strikingly smart and daringly feminist (Jenny Offill), brilliantly odd ( The Irish Independent ), and beguiling ( The Wall Street Journal ). In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other , four distinct sections operate like Joseph Cornell boxes, each offering its own vibrant proposal for what contemporary writing might be. Prairie is a cycle of stories set in the Midwest, a surreal landscape of wildflowers, ominous rivers, violence, virtual reality, art, fear, and loss. The conceptual work in Dresses reconsiders the canon through the lens of its garb, like a wild literary closet. Art turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction relate to one another, a theme central to the whole book. The final section, Other, collects pieces in irregular (other) forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious or heartbreaking for reasons as inexplicable as the abiding beauty and strangeness of all of Dutton's work.