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

“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.

“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

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

“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

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

“[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

“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

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‘s] eclectic entries make for exciting reading, adding up to a surprisingly cohesive whole that testifies to art’s ability to inspire new ways of seeing the world. Relentlessly surprising and thoroughly original, this dazzles.” Publishers Weekly