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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is as much a manifesto about artmaking and community-building, as it is a conserver and explorer of real and imagined environments.” —Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, The London Magazine

“Dutton again shows she is a masterful practitioner of the—seemingly any—small form. . . . Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a welcome addition to the boundary-resistant genre of ‘weird little book.’ ” —Dan Irving, Annulet

“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

“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”

“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

“Figuring ekphrasis as a conversation as she does, it’s notable how many voices Dutton’s collection brings into the conversation—from the sixty-six quotations which make up the section ‘Dresses’ to the presence of writers and artists throughout the fictional and nonfictional stretches of the book, which is always about reading and writing even when it is telling a story. Like many of the writers she converses with (Renee Gladman and Amina Cain, among others) she is not moving towards answers or resolution when she writes an essay or a story, but resting in the generative space of the question. This potentiality of the yet-to-be makes me think of what the theorist Erin Manning calls the ‘minor gesture,’ which ‘alters to the core what thinking can do,’ giving ‘value to the processual uncertainty of thought as yet unformed’ (x); thought is by nature unfixed, in motion, gestural rather than fully formed—and this is a thinking collection. It also reminds me of Julietta Singh’s refiguring of academic work as a conversation, an exchange, rather than an aggressive procedure of identifying someone else’s lack and imposing yourself there—of ‘going into the holes.’ In retaining the holes, Singh’s implicit advice, somehow the result is one of building rather than taking away—as conversation, another form of collaboration, builds.” —Hilary White, Tripwire

“[Dutton] confides that her own encounters with art ‘frequently make the world strange, and it is when the world is strange, or when I am awake to its strangeness, that I am most compelled to write.’ Reading Dutton’s book had a similar effect on me; its linked stories and essays feel like connecting rooms in a museum of personal disquiet, where a line or an image has the power to estrange and enchant in equal measure.” —Katie Assef, The Dial

“Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is full of astonishing things.” —Bradley Bazzle, Colorado Review

“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

“My favorite read of 2024 (so far)! As soon as I finished it I began it again. An incredibly diverse collection, united by Dutton’s brilliant and sublime sensibility. Seriously, don’t miss this one.” —Elliott Bay Books, “Staff Pick” from John

“[Dutton’s] work is consistently fascinating—startling and elegant, amusing and strange—but what feels new about Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is its way of containing such thrilling variousness in one compact volume. The book, organized according to the idiosyncratic taxonomy in its title, collects sixteen essays and short stories, all of them animated by the desire to never behave predictably. . . . she opens spaces for surprise.” —Jonathon Atkinson, Rain Taxi

“Dutton displays a masterful command of mood; there is a pervasive sense of unease, a sinister undercurrent to the text, and a tangible eeriness to these stories. She achieves this in part through the inclusion of a recurring theme across the stories, one of loneliness and absence. Again truth is gestured toward and hinted at, in the ways in which these stories capture a reality of human experience even amongst the surreal, dreamed, and imagined.” —Meghana Kandlur, Sixty Inches from Center

“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

“In her dazzling hyper-hybrid collection [Dutton] collapses any narrow ideas of what and who a writer is, even within the confines of a single volume. . . . But that’s kind of how things—reading, writing, talking over dinner, looking at paintings in the gallery—work. Rather than a question of reduction or simplification, Dutton bares the associative workings of memory and experience, and allows herself to chase those long and fuzzy tails.’” —Denise Rose Hansen, Mslexia

“Like prairies, Dutton’s writing feels expansive, eternal, spreading out in all directions, far beyond you—far past any kind of vanishing point. When immersed in both the landscape of the prairie and in Dutton’s work, one is overcome by the sensation that they can see forever.” —Nikki Barnhart, The Journal

“Dutton’s last novel, Margaret the First, was a revelation to me, so I was well-primed for this, and read it twice in a week because once was just not enough. It’s quartered in the way you’d guess from the title, though there’s a prevailing dis-ease that reverberates throughout much of the book—an eerie membrane—as if we’re tiptoeing right up to the edge of the known world. ‘Dresses’ was a particularly thrilling assemblage, and there’s nothing I like more than books that have no interest in category, that dance and twist between many different forms.” —Jamie Hood

“How much of what we make is a translation of what we experience? This is one of Dutton’s questions. We look at an image, we look at a garden, and translate it in our own language. And isn’t that a kind of conversation we have with art, and with each other?” —Rebecca Valley, Pleiades

“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

“When we pay slow, close attention to something—whether it’s an object, an artwork, a book, a feeling, or an experience—the effort can be disorienting. As Dutton shows us again and again in this book, that disorientation can also be dazzling and refreshing.” —Julia Ridley Smith, The Adroit Journal

“[Dutton’s] work is not merely about conveying a narrative; it’s about capturing the ineffable—the feelings, the sensations, and the fleeting moments that often escape words.” —Angela Stubbs, Mindful

“You’re never sure whether Dutton is still on the outside, or getting at the narrator’s anxiety within. But that uncertainty feels part of this project, which gives us not just a cycle of stylishly observed stories but also, midway through, the tools to read them.” —Lucy Thynne, The Telegraph (UK)