Book Description

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 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 or 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.