Coffee House Press, 2024 / Prototype (UK), 2024

“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.This is Dutton at her best yet.” —Cristina Rivera Garza

“Relentlessly surprising and thoroughly original, this dazzles.” —Publishers Weekly

“In her finely tempered collection of essays and experimental writing, Dutton, author of Margaret the First, explores a conceptual take on storytelling involving the ineffable feeling of a text, beyond mere words. Her work is highbrow while remaining mischievously playful, reminiscent of the form-smashing thrills of writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson.” —Kirkus, starred review

“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? . . . Dutton’s greatest powers are her immense skill with language; her exacting attention to image, sound, phrase; her commitment to creating strangeness and newness. Every sentence rewrites a million lesser sentences before it.” —Deb Olin Unferth, The Believer

“Dutton’s work is always formally inventive, refreshingly ambitious, and totally brilliant.” —The Millions, “Most Anticipated”

“This book is so wild—I’m obsessed.” —Lara Mimosa Montes

“This is one everyone will be talking about.” —Emily Firetog, Literary Hub

“[Dutton’s] 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

“Dutton collects stories and other writing in such a gorgeous way that every section feels like a revelation.” Boston.com, “15 books that you should read this spring”

“In a world where planetary catastrophe has become perfectly ordinary, Danielle Dutton’s lush and startling new collection reimagines familiar forms to show us how works of art can still unmoor us, help us reckon with all those losses and holes and glitches in what now passes for the real and powerfully insist on the strangeness of strange times.” —Jennifer Hodgson

“These are short stories, or short essays—short, strange, intelligent, incantatory garments—that are so good we want to wear them and then repeat them, and read them again.” —Type Books, Staff Pick

“Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a welcome addition to the boundary-resistant genre of ‘weird little book.’ It reminds me of Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, with its artistic statement-of-purpose accompanied by demonstrations of how questioning our teaspoons might work in practice. It reminds me, too, of Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, in its anecdotal, form-hopping account of art and life (as a court attendant; as an editor, teacher, mother) in the waning days of a current order.” —Dan Irving, Annulet

“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

“This surreal, (in)sightful collection of essays and stories is riotous and sublime, a love letter to making art.” —Mairead Small Staid

“In these essays and fictions, which are so attuned to textures, glimpses, and high contrasts between dark and bright spaces, Dutton proposes the book as ‘installation’, an invitation to remember what it’s like to move through linked spaces in the company of near-others. Proximity hurts, but it also amplifies sensation, the formidable and delicate orientations experienced in conditions with exits and entrances of many kinds. As Dutton writes: ‘Ostensibly I write novels and stories, yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots.’ At times, this proposition is a mode of impasse, the not-writing that is also writing, in the lineage of an experimental narrative tradition that prickles in the body first.” —Bhanu Kapil

“[Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other] gives us not just a cycle of stylishly observed stories but also, midway through, the tools to read them.” —Lucy Thynne, The Telegraph (UK)