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.

Publication date: April 23, 2024

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.5 

Page count: 176 pages

ISBN: 9781566897037

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.

Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction

A Document Top Read of 2024

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of (early) 2024

A Bookshop.org Most Anticipated Book of 2024

A Millions Most Anticipated Book 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

"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

"[Dutton] gives us not just a cycle of stylishly observed stories but also, midway through, the tools to read them."

—Lucy Thynne, The Telegraph

“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

“This is Dutton at her best yet.”

—Cristina Rivera Garza

“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

“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

“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