Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times.

Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. The collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create. ‘Prairie’ is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest, replete with wildflowers, ominous rivers, fireflies, cattle lowing and ghostly apparitions; ‘Dresses’ paints a wild and moving portrait of literary fashions; ‘Art’ is an imaginative illustrated essay which explores the relationship between fiction and visual art; and ‘Other’ offers an assemblage of irregular stories and essays that 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.