What do you think?
Rate this book
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
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.
“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.
176 pages, Paperback
First published April 23, 2024
35 people are currently reading
2478 people want to read
About the author
Danielle Dutton
18 books154 followersDanielle Dutton's fiction has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, The Paris Review, The White Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, and NOON. She is the author of Attempts at a Life, which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called "indescribably beautiful"; SPRAWL, a finalist for the Believer Book Award in 2011, reprinted by Wave Books with an Afterword by Renee Gladman in 2018; Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft; and the novel Margaret the First. In 2010, Dutton co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt Dorothy, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the back hills of southern California. Over the past decade, the press has published the work of Renee Gladman, Leonora Carrington, Cristina Rivera Garza, Barbara Comyns, Jen George, Amina Cain, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Sabrina Orah Mark, Nathalie Leger, and other innovative writers.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 92 reviews
December 19, 2024
Danielle Dutton’s intriguing compilation – some entries originally appeared in magazines and literary journals – ranges between fiction and non-fiction. The opening section's comprised of stories collectively labelled as ‘Prairie’ building on Dutton’s ongoing fascination with prairie landscapes, nature and the ravages of climate change. Brooding, often intense slice-of-life stories which feature unexpectedly bizarre encounters and surreal twists. Many explicitly tease out connections with work that’s meaningful to Dutton from Woolf and Katherine Mansfield’s short stories to art by Whistler and Yayoi Kusama. The figure of modernist Mina Loy looms over “Lost Lunar Apogee” a richly associative piece that sometimes read like a sinister variation on Mary Ruefle’s writing. “Installation” is indebted to Anna Kavan and, like Kavan, there’s something slightly elliptical and off-kilter about Dutton’s vision of the world around her. Hers is a decidedly menacing America. This sense of threat’s often suggested by the specifics that come to define otherwise nebulous characters: from an unnerving campsite manager boasting a MAGA hat to a cryptid-obsessed son in the ominous “These Bad Things.”
“Dresses” marks a slight change in direction. Here, Dutton plays with cut-up techniques, weaving together paragraphs referencing women’s dresses taken from texts she’s deliberately placed in conversation with each other. For Dutton “Dresses” conjures Margaret Cavendish’s notion that dresses form a kind of poetry of women. But it also connects back to Dutton’s childhood obsession with compiling collections from boxes to butterflies. “Art” shifts to non-fiction and an exploration of writing that’s consciously in dialogue with visual art – as in Dutton’s earlier SPRAWL and her interaction with Laura Letinsky’s still-life photos. “Other” is a miscellany that ranges from reflections on authors from Cristina Rivera Garza to Ann Quin to an enigmatic one-act play that encapsulates Dutton’s commitment to intertextuality; as well as her desire to question, and sometimes dispense with, conventional genre boundaries. I had mixed reactions to the more essayistic content but I found Dutton’s stories utterly compelling, sufficiently distinctive to make the whole collection more than worthwhile.
Thanks to Edelweiss and Coffee House Press for an ARC
Rating: 3.5
“Dresses” marks a slight change in direction. Here, Dutton plays with cut-up techniques, weaving together paragraphs referencing women’s dresses taken from texts she’s deliberately placed in conversation with each other. For Dutton “Dresses” conjures Margaret Cavendish’s notion that dresses form a kind of poetry of women. But it also connects back to Dutton’s childhood obsession with compiling collections from boxes to butterflies. “Art” shifts to non-fiction and an exploration of writing that’s consciously in dialogue with visual art – as in Dutton’s earlier SPRAWL and her interaction with Laura Letinsky’s still-life photos. “Other” is a miscellany that ranges from reflections on authors from Cristina Rivera Garza to Ann Quin to an enigmatic one-act play that encapsulates Dutton’s commitment to intertextuality; as well as her desire to question, and sometimes dispense with, conventional genre boundaries. I had mixed reactions to the more essayistic content but I found Dutton’s stories utterly compelling, sufficiently distinctive to make the whole collection more than worthwhile.
Thanks to Edelweiss and Coffee House Press for an ARC
Rating: 3.5
December 10, 2024
Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2025
Ostensibly, I write novels and stories, yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is astonishing. I want to ask: How might fiction be conceived of as a space within which we attend to the world? A way of opening spaces – prairies, paragraphs, rooms – in which the world can occur? How might a story ‘em body a specific way of looking? I looking I mean seeing, but I also mean a way of being in relation to the world, a politics of attention.
The quote above is the opening of the 'Art' section of Danielle 'Dutton's Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other', this 3rd part of the book an essay on ekphrastic writing, or rather the type of innovative fiction that Dutton values (and which is increasingly one of my favourite forms of writing), writing which takes place as a dialetic between two impulses, art's ability to make strange what has grown familiar and translation's desirable to make recognisable the experience of one artwork within the space of another.
As an exemplar she cites Eley Williams ‘Smote (or When I find I cannot Kiss You In Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)’ from the brilliant Republic of Consciousness Prize winning collection Attrib. and other stories for the way it acts as a diptych with Riley's 'Movement in Squares': the two pieces throw their energies back and forth/
Dutton's own novelistic contribution to this ouevre was her novel SPRAWL, "a stream-of-consciousness collage of domesticity and intimacy, the unwavering assertion of a suburban woman’s individuality and selfhood" (Paris Review) melded "with commentary on photographer Laura Letinsky’s domestic still lifes" (3: AM). That this covered similar ground in the first of these elements to Ducks, Newburyport, but in 144 pages rather than over 1000, and combined with intelligent art criticism rather than Trumpesque name calling, may explain the spectacularly mean-minded review Lucy Ellmann gave Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other in the NY Times (I won't give it any more exposure by linking to it).
The 'Dresses' section of the work is a collage 'Sixty-Six Dressed I Have Read' with a curated display in words, brief quotes describing dresses from literary works ranging from Charlotte Bronte and Tolstoy to the poetry of 김혜순 (in Don Mee Choi's translation), .
And the sections that book end this collection, 'Prairie' and 'Other' are a total of 14 short-short-stories, typically in dialogue with other works and writers/artists.
In 'To want for nothing' - the narrator is reading a book about another woman who is reading a book - which the narrator realises she recognises. The original book is the narrator is reading is Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive and the book-within-the-book Suite for Barbara Loden which the narrator has read in the translation by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon (the first book from Menon's press Les Fugutives), and whose US edition was published by Dorothy Project, the press co-founded by Dutton herself.
But then the narrator realises the character in Luiselli's book is actually reading the novel in French She and the child talk, and that’s when it’s revealed that she is reading other book in its original language, French, where all this time I’ve been reading everything in English. For some reason this shocks me.
The story 'Installation' was another highlight, in explicit conversation with Woolf’s In the Orchard and Anna Kavan’s A Bright Green Field, as well as an explicit nod to Yayoi Kusama’s dots.
And 'One Women and Two Great Men' covers Fleur Jaeggy who translated into Italian ‘Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren’. This book, by Ehregott Andreas Wasianski was translated into English by Thomas de Quincey as ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ which, per the story he translated and annotated in such a way as to leave the reader with the impression that the words and experiences were De Quincey’s very own. So much so that When people mention that Jaeggy translated De Quincey, they inevitably cite as evidence "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant". Has ever a translator - I mean here de Quincey - so eclipsed the one he translates - I mean now Wasianski?
And Pool of Tears (A Play in One Act), the longest piece at 16 pages (but with generous spacing) speaks, in its brief (and amusing) word count to writing in the age of climate change and theories of art/the novel by Amitav Ghosh, Victor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Samuel R Delany and Rob Nixon, before finishing with the Métis scholar of Indigenous studies, human-animal studies, science and technology studies and the Anthropocene, Zoe Todd.
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is the latest book from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club which raises the fund that support the UKs most exciting annual book prize as well as showcasing a collection of books from the vibrant small independent press scene.
The book has been published in the UK by Prototype Press who are "committed to creating new possibilities in the publishing of fiction and poetry through a flexible, interdisciplinary approach", and this work certainly lives up to that aspiration.
Dutton's own thoughts behind the collection - and how it does or doesn't cohere - can be found in this transcript of a Between the Covers podcast interview.
A fascinating work.
Ostensibly, I write novels and stories, yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is astonishing. I want to ask: How might fiction be conceived of as a space within which we attend to the world? A way of opening spaces – prairies, paragraphs, rooms – in which the world can occur? How might a story ‘em body a specific way of looking? I looking I mean seeing, but I also mean a way of being in relation to the world, a politics of attention.
The quote above is the opening of the 'Art' section of Danielle 'Dutton's Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other', this 3rd part of the book an essay on ekphrastic writing, or rather the type of innovative fiction that Dutton values (and which is increasingly one of my favourite forms of writing), writing which takes place as a dialetic between two impulses, art's ability to make strange what has grown familiar and translation's desirable to make recognisable the experience of one artwork within the space of another.
As an exemplar she cites Eley Williams ‘Smote (or When I find I cannot Kiss You In Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)’ from the brilliant Republic of Consciousness Prize winning collection Attrib. and other stories for the way it acts as a diptych with Riley's 'Movement in Squares': the two pieces throw their energies back and forth/
Dutton's own novelistic contribution to this ouevre was her novel SPRAWL, "a stream-of-consciousness collage of domesticity and intimacy, the unwavering assertion of a suburban woman’s individuality and selfhood" (Paris Review) melded "with commentary on photographer Laura Letinsky’s domestic still lifes" (3: AM). That this covered similar ground in the first of these elements to Ducks, Newburyport, but in 144 pages rather than over 1000, and combined with intelligent art criticism rather than Trumpesque name calling, may explain the spectacularly mean-minded review Lucy Ellmann gave Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other in the NY Times (I won't give it any more exposure by linking to it).
The 'Dresses' section of the work is a collage 'Sixty-Six Dressed I Have Read' with a curated display in words, brief quotes describing dresses from literary works ranging from Charlotte Bronte and Tolstoy to the poetry of 김혜순 (in Don Mee Choi's translation), .
And the sections that book end this collection, 'Prairie' and 'Other' are a total of 14 short-short-stories, typically in dialogue with other works and writers/artists.
In 'To want for nothing' - the narrator is reading a book about another woman who is reading a book - which the narrator realises she recognises. The original book is the narrator is reading is Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive and the book-within-the-book Suite for Barbara Loden which the narrator has read in the translation by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon (the first book from Menon's press Les Fugutives), and whose US edition was published by Dorothy Project, the press co-founded by Dutton herself.
But then the narrator realises the character in Luiselli's book is actually reading the novel in French She and the child talk, and that’s when it’s revealed that she is reading other book in its original language, French, where all this time I’ve been reading everything in English. For some reason this shocks me.
The story 'Installation' was another highlight, in explicit conversation with Woolf’s In the Orchard and Anna Kavan’s A Bright Green Field, as well as an explicit nod to Yayoi Kusama’s dots.
And 'One Women and Two Great Men' covers Fleur Jaeggy who translated into Italian ‘Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren’. This book, by Ehregott Andreas Wasianski was translated into English by Thomas de Quincey as ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ which, per the story he translated and annotated in such a way as to leave the reader with the impression that the words and experiences were De Quincey’s very own. So much so that When people mention that Jaeggy translated De Quincey, they inevitably cite as evidence "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant". Has ever a translator - I mean here de Quincey - so eclipsed the one he translates - I mean now Wasianski?
And Pool of Tears (A Play in One Act), the longest piece at 16 pages (but with generous spacing) speaks, in its brief (and amusing) word count to writing in the age of climate change and theories of art/the novel by Amitav Ghosh, Victor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Samuel R Delany and Rob Nixon, before finishing with the Métis scholar of Indigenous studies, human-animal studies, science and technology studies and the Anthropocene, Zoe Todd.
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is the latest book from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club which raises the fund that support the UKs most exciting annual book prize as well as showcasing a collection of books from the vibrant small independent press scene.
The book has been published in the UK by Prototype Press who are "committed to creating new possibilities in the publishing of fiction and poetry through a flexible, interdisciplinary approach", and this work certainly lives up to that aspiration.
Dutton's own thoughts behind the collection - and how it does or doesn't cohere - can be found in this transcript of a Between the Covers podcast interview.
A fascinating work.
January 1, 2025
In this collection, Danielle Dutton employs a mode of writing that is genre-resistant, richly allusive, and seemingly free-associative though likely carefully constructed. While some pieces are delineated as 'stories' and others as 'essays', they all feel like they spring from a similar approach. Dutton references many favorites of mine, including Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, Renee Gladman, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Virginia Woolf. I can't say that every piece resonated with me, but the overall effect was inspirational. If you appreciate writers such as Mary Ruefle and Anne Carson, you will likely enjoy this.
June 3, 2024
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a book bound to produce a wide range of interpretations. It’s one where I understand those who say it’s brilliant and those who say it’s nonsense. I think it’s a bit of both.
Split into four sections, Prairie is a collection of surreal short stories that are best read through the frame of having already read the Art section, which comes later in the book. They’re dreamlike, touch on climate disaster, and are much more focused on the landscape and place than on character. I didn’t really appreciate these until I read them a second time.
In Dresses, Dutton has curated a collection of 66 quotations from other books that describe a dress or someone wearing a dress. This, to me, was the weakest section of the book and reminded me of a lot of modern art where others seem to be able to find meaning or depth in what to me is a whole lot of nothing. And it’s not the piece itself that I find hollow, but more so it’s relationship to the other three components of the book. I wasn’t convinced by the meaning and importance given in the author’s response to “Why Dresses?”.
The Art section was by far the standout portion of the book. In it, Dutton takes the idea of ekphrasis and through several intertextual examples, shows how its meaning can go beyond a simple description of a visual art piece and instead become a piece of fiction that embodies the feeling and experience of viewing said art piece. I was absolutely compelled by the work of the artists and writers mentioned in this portion and Dutton’s commentary on their work as it relates to being ekphrastic. The only unconvincing bit from this section was Dutton’s own text-image focused collaboration with Richard Kraft. I couldn’t see beyond the futility of it.
In Other, we’re back to the surreal stories/essays, though they’re shorter and to me, less impactful than the reread of Prairie, despite coming right after the Art section.
So, it’s a mixed bag! Dutton’s push beyond the limits of what a book can be was successful for me sometimes and I appreciate the attempt regardless. I must also add that as a someone who has lived in or very near Missouri for most of my life, I find her commitment to donating 50% of the proceeds of this book to the Missouri Prairie Foundation very admirable.
ETA: I forgot to mention how much I loved the nested nature of several of the stories; characters reading books about characters who are reading books that have been mentioned elsewhere in this book, characters living both in the present and navigating a video game landscape, and more. Dutton calls these fictional worlds within fictional worlds as "going inside the dollhouse". This was one of my favorite aspects of the short stories.
Split into four sections, Prairie is a collection of surreal short stories that are best read through the frame of having already read the Art section, which comes later in the book. They’re dreamlike, touch on climate disaster, and are much more focused on the landscape and place than on character. I didn’t really appreciate these until I read them a second time.
In Dresses, Dutton has curated a collection of 66 quotations from other books that describe a dress or someone wearing a dress. This, to me, was the weakest section of the book and reminded me of a lot of modern art where others seem to be able to find meaning or depth in what to me is a whole lot of nothing. And it’s not the piece itself that I find hollow, but more so it’s relationship to the other three components of the book. I wasn’t convinced by the meaning and importance given in the author’s response to “Why Dresses?”.
The Art section was by far the standout portion of the book. In it, Dutton takes the idea of ekphrasis and through several intertextual examples, shows how its meaning can go beyond a simple description of a visual art piece and instead become a piece of fiction that embodies the feeling and experience of viewing said art piece. I was absolutely compelled by the work of the artists and writers mentioned in this portion and Dutton’s commentary on their work as it relates to being ekphrastic. The only unconvincing bit from this section was Dutton’s own text-image focused collaboration with Richard Kraft. I couldn’t see beyond the futility of it.
In Other, we’re back to the surreal stories/essays, though they’re shorter and to me, less impactful than the reread of Prairie, despite coming right after the Art section.
So, it’s a mixed bag! Dutton’s push beyond the limits of what a book can be was successful for me sometimes and I appreciate the attempt regardless. I must also add that as a someone who has lived in or very near Missouri for most of my life, I find her commitment to donating 50% of the proceeds of this book to the Missouri Prairie Foundation very admirable.
ETA: I forgot to mention how much I loved the nested nature of several of the stories; characters reading books about characters who are reading books that have been mentioned elsewhere in this book, characters living both in the present and navigating a video game landscape, and more. Dutton calls these fictional worlds within fictional worlds as "going inside the dollhouse". This was one of my favorite aspects of the short stories.
July 30, 2024
Essay collections, no matter how alt, are usually not my thing, but I had to see what the author of the brilliantly quirky historical novel on the life of the brilliantly quirky Margaret Cavendish (Margaret the First) did with this format. I liked much of it (snatches of story about the prairie, essays on writing about art) and loved some of it (66 literary quotations about dresses from fiction and non fiction, and the final section of story/essay hybrids - especially "One Woman and Two Great Men".) I still don't understand how a collection of quotations about dresses could be so mesmerizing!
September 21, 2024
"We make machines for remembering what we loved."
This book defies easy categorization but I found all four parts engaging and dynamic in terms of the way they intersected and spoke with one another. Apparently, I have frequently enjoyed ekphrastic writing and never knew there was a name for it. Whether Dutton is telling a story or framing an essay, she seems like a writer who's both incredibly well-read, intelligent, and deeply curious (reminds me a bit of Kate Briggs having just read her for the first time recently). Fans of Dorothy Publishing will recognize quite a few authors and references in this book as Dutton is one of the co-founders of the press.
"…the job of art is to make the world strange so that we might see it again rather than simply recognizing it out of habit. The way art does this is through a process [Viktor Shklovsky] calls OCTPAHEHNE, transliterated as “ostranenie” and translated as 'defamiliarization' or, neologistically, as 'estrangement'(i.e., enchantment + estrangement). 'Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life,' he writes, 'it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.' "
Indeed, this is one of those pieces that performs as it probes, estranging the familiar for the reader so that we may find enchantment once again, be that in art, writing, or dress/fashion. And even within categories/sections there is a wonderful blending and merging of voice/form. In the last section, I wasn't sure whether "One Woman & Two Great Men" was an essay or a story, but I didn't care as I found it so engrossing and funny. And there were other pieces like “Somehow” that I found wonderfully surreptitious... elusive; I loved it and still can't tell you why.
--------------------------------
WORDS I'M STILL TRYING TO FAMILIARIZE MYSELF WITH
cryptid | khalkedon | hapax legomenon | baldric | ostranenie
April 20, 2024
A really interesting book—sort of a hybrid between a short story collection and an essay collection. Danielle Dutton is the founder of Dorothy, a publishing project, which is legendary in literary spaces for quality and scope; they focus mostly on female writers, often in translation. This past year, they published “The Long Form” by Kate Briggs, one of my favorite books in recent memory.
The book is split into four parts, per the title; “Prairie” is a collection of surreal short stories that are the thing closest in spirit Kafka I’ve read in a while—something about the fraying of the narrators’ psyches and the breakdown of ordinary logic. My favorite of these is “My Wonderful Description of Flowers,” which you can read in The New Yorker (or listen to Dutton herself read, which I did the first time); I highly recommend it. “Dresses” features a sort of prose collage, “Sixty-six Dresses I Have Read,” which includes 66 brief descriptions of dresses from across literature. It’s an interesting idea but probably the least captivating part of the book for me. “Art” is an essay on ekphrasis, “A Picture Held Us Captive,” which is phenomenal. “Other” includes what I would consider short stories and essayistic short stories, ostensibly autofiction, some of them very short. (I think Dutton wants the ambiguity of whether or not the stories in this section are fictional; although the stories in the first part also share some qualities with autofiction, the strange and surreal twists they take precludes them from that category, I think. My favorite of the sections in “Other” is the first, “One Women and Two Great Men,” on “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” especially given the way that story engages with the ekphrastic concerns in the essay—telling and retelling, the notion of translation. I didn’t fall in love with every single one of the short stories in “Prairie” and “Other,” but the great moments are easily enough to make up for the less-interesting ones. I will be very interested to read some of Dutton’s earlier writing.
The book is split into four parts, per the title; “Prairie” is a collection of surreal short stories that are the thing closest in spirit Kafka I’ve read in a while—something about the fraying of the narrators’ psyches and the breakdown of ordinary logic. My favorite of these is “My Wonderful Description of Flowers,” which you can read in The New Yorker (or listen to Dutton herself read, which I did the first time); I highly recommend it. “Dresses” features a sort of prose collage, “Sixty-six Dresses I Have Read,” which includes 66 brief descriptions of dresses from across literature. It’s an interesting idea but probably the least captivating part of the book for me. “Art” is an essay on ekphrasis, “A Picture Held Us Captive,” which is phenomenal. “Other” includes what I would consider short stories and essayistic short stories, ostensibly autofiction, some of them very short. (I think Dutton wants the ambiguity of whether or not the stories in this section are fictional; although the stories in the first part also share some qualities with autofiction, the strange and surreal twists they take precludes them from that category, I think. My favorite of the sections in “Other” is the first, “One Women and Two Great Men,” on “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” especially given the way that story engages with the ekphrastic concerns in the essay—telling and retelling, the notion of translation. I didn’t fall in love with every single one of the short stories in “Prairie” and “Other,” but the great moments are easily enough to make up for the less-interesting ones. I will be very interested to read some of Dutton’s earlier writing.
July 3, 2024
Another book where I'm torn on how to rate it. Ultimately I think this is an examination on what writing can do to the reader--what it can convey, the experience the reader has--but since this is a collection of essays and stories, some worked better than others. She is very interested in ekphrastic writing, writing that is in conversation with artwork, it would have been great to know what artwork she was writing in conversation with at the top of each piece or right at the end rather than buried in notes at the end. Again, another book worth picking up, but not a book I see myself returning to or re-reading.
May 6, 2024
2.5
While reading, I was overly sympathetic to Dutton. She takes her risks, which semi-succeed, and she writes installation pieces, which dissipate into ambiance, yet a lingering remains in the back of your head as you think: what does this all really achieve? Many of these stories operate in response to climate apocalypse and general cultural ennui caused by chaos, looming in its many forms (the passage of time, political disintegration, the crumbling of the natural world, unstable relationship dynamics, aesthetic uncertainty, etc.), but you'd be hard-pressed to find these fictions/essay/oddities particularly insightful. There's a glaring bourgeois consciousness to all of it, a consciousness that links everything together.
The Lucy Ellmann NYT review of this panned Dutton's work and was thus panned in response. Grad students and MFA professors and Twitter literati came together to whine about the vicious whataboutisms at the heart of Ellmann's curt cries against Dutton's collection: MFA programs are sucking the lifeblood from worthwhile writers and Dutton is riding on her laurels and not exerting herself, not looking beyond her experience enough to render a bevy of impactful texts, instead constantly referencing contemporarily chic authors and visual artists to bolster an otherwise rather empty series of nonentities. Everyone got so mad about Ellmann's ATTACKS on teaching. God forbid one author of note consider creative writing as an academic discipline rather trite. Why must everyone be so tear-sodden and irascible?
The review, regardless of anyone's viewpoint, is the only reason this book came to my attention. Before the ephemeral drama surrounding Ellmann's displeasure, her brief summaries of how this book operates intrigued me enough to think that I wanted to come to my own conclusion, that it seemed as if Dutton could be divisive voice, a writer of peculiarity, one whom you could call upon to expand your vision of what literature can be and become. What I find myself with are half-baked achievements and series of reading lists purporting themselves to be literature (and what's worse: some of the writers referenced on these lists are edited by Dutton herself! She's not just a charlatan bound to her influences but a nepotistic charlatan overly consumed by the desire to espouse the quotes of those she edits as the guiding lights of literature's present and future! Grow up!). There is good to be found here, like finding a grouse in a graveyard or a blue ash amid the blue sky.
While reading, I was overly sympathetic to Dutton. She takes her risks, which semi-succeed, and she writes installation pieces, which dissipate into ambiance, yet a lingering remains in the back of your head as you think: what does this all really achieve? Many of these stories operate in response to climate apocalypse and general cultural ennui caused by chaos, looming in its many forms (the passage of time, political disintegration, the crumbling of the natural world, unstable relationship dynamics, aesthetic uncertainty, etc.), but you'd be hard-pressed to find these fictions/essay/oddities particularly insightful. There's a glaring bourgeois consciousness to all of it, a consciousness that links everything together.
The Lucy Ellmann NYT review of this panned Dutton's work and was thus panned in response. Grad students and MFA professors and Twitter literati came together to whine about the vicious whataboutisms at the heart of Ellmann's curt cries against Dutton's collection: MFA programs are sucking the lifeblood from worthwhile writers and Dutton is riding on her laurels and not exerting herself, not looking beyond her experience enough to render a bevy of impactful texts, instead constantly referencing contemporarily chic authors and visual artists to bolster an otherwise rather empty series of nonentities. Everyone got so mad about Ellmann's ATTACKS on teaching. God forbid one author of note consider creative writing as an academic discipline rather trite. Why must everyone be so tear-sodden and irascible?
The review, regardless of anyone's viewpoint, is the only reason this book came to my attention. Before the ephemeral drama surrounding Ellmann's displeasure, her brief summaries of how this book operates intrigued me enough to think that I wanted to come to my own conclusion, that it seemed as if Dutton could be divisive voice, a writer of peculiarity, one whom you could call upon to expand your vision of what literature can be and become. What I find myself with are half-baked achievements and series of reading lists purporting themselves to be literature (and what's worse: some of the writers referenced on these lists are edited by Dutton herself! She's not just a charlatan bound to her influences but a nepotistic charlatan overly consumed by the desire to espouse the quotes of those she edits as the guiding lights of literature's present and future! Grow up!). There is good to be found here, like finding a grouse in a graveyard or a blue ash amid the blue sky.
August 4, 2024
A very unique book broken into 4 sections Prairie, Dress, Art, and Other. Prairie is made up of surreal and dreamlike short stories, Dress is made of many quotes from other pieces of writing that describe women in dresses, Art is a wonderful essay extrapolating on art and writing, and Other brings us back to short stories. I really enjoyed each section - I was most taken with Prairie and Art. There’s an intimacy to the way that Dutton writes about reading and writing that felt very special.
4.5
4.5
June 24, 2024
A unique & delightful collage.
As I read, my recurring thought was that "Prairie" was the internal monologue of a woman, "Dresses" was the external monologue of a woman, & "Art" was the intersection between the two, whether in how the woman reacts to the external or in how the external reacts to the woman. I don't know that any of that is accurate or even really makes sense to others, but those were the thoughts rolling around inside me as I read.
"Other" felt like something else altogether & was more essay-based. I don't tend to read many essays, short or long, so perhaps that's why I didn't connect as much with the final section of the book.
Half of the proceeds are being donated by Dutton to the Missouri Prairie Foundation, which works to conserve remaining prairies & native grasslands.
Overall, another hit for Coffee House Press & quite a cool book.
As I read, my recurring thought was that "Prairie" was the internal monologue of a woman, "Dresses" was the external monologue of a woman, & "Art" was the intersection between the two, whether in how the woman reacts to the external or in how the external reacts to the woman. I don't know that any of that is accurate or even really makes sense to others, but those were the thoughts rolling around inside me as I read.
"Other" felt like something else altogether & was more essay-based. I don't tend to read many essays, short or long, so perhaps that's why I didn't connect as much with the final section of the book.
Half of the proceeds are being donated by Dutton to the Missouri Prairie Foundation, which works to conserve remaining prairies & native grasslands.
Overall, another hit for Coffee House Press & quite a cool book.
July 14, 2024
Recommend borrowing this from the library just to read the section called "Art" which is comprised of a 25 page essay called "A Picture Held Us Captive."
June 3, 2024
The division of this book into multiple sections that take their own discrete approaches in the building of the text reminds me somewhat of reading Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Part I - here's a section of aphorisms, here's a musicological analysis of Mozart's Don Giovanni, here's how to avoid being bored in life, etc., all demonstrating what Kierkegaard views as the aesthetic way of life. In Dutton's text there's a section of short stories, a section of sentences taken from other works describing the dresses of their characters, a section about writing in relation to art, and a section of several very short pieces, all seeming to me to demonstrate effort to find a new approach to literature for the current age.
Why might we need that new approach? In the last piece, a surreal play in which a character swimming in a lake talks to the audience before the lake overflows into the theatre and drowns audience members, the character brings up
The "New Avocado", an avocado created without the pit, a story about which the character heard on the radio, seems to me to stand in here for the changes humanity has and is making to nature through scientific/technological methods. Particularly climate change. In this new Anthropocene era, I think the text is saying, our conception of the novel from an earlier time, and the Realist mode particularly I'd assume, is outdated, and we need to play around with finding a new one.
Is that what this book is "about"? I don't know, probably there are numerous things one could take from reading it. It's a bit of a grab-bag, even if the pieces sometimes relate to another piece somewhere. It seems an excellent subject for reader-response theory analysis; this is what I make of it, who cares what the author intended!
But if Dutton is experimenting with finding a new form, she seems to be leaning here towards incorporating surrealism, nonfiction, physical spaces, collage, and paying specific attention to habituated details to shake the reader up. Her first section, Prairie, consists of 5 short stories, 4 of them previously published, which downgrade plot in favor of describing the physical environment of their settings and have dreamlike, surreal air. They also possess an ominous feeling, such as a person worried about the coming effects of climate change might feel.
The Dresses section fits with what she describes in the Art section as her interests in "things" and in the critic Shklovsky's idea that art should make the habitual strange to us so that we can look at aspects of life anew and feel things again. Does this have relation to an idea that humans being habituated to, complacent with, our way of life and the changing climate presents an existential danger that we need to be shaken out of? Pay new attention to the world around you! To prairies and lakes and hillsides, yes, but also to dresses. In Other she intermixes pieces of fiction and nonfiction.
This is academic writing, I don't think that Ellman review in the NYT can be said to be wrong about that. It does not care for plot. It cares for intellect. Reading it was generally an interesting experience for me more than an enjoyable one, other than the Prairie section, whose stories I did generally "enjoy", which alas seems a rather low-brow criterion with which to judge this text.
Why might we need that new approach? In the last piece, a surreal play in which a character swimming in a lake talks to the audience before the lake overflows into the theatre and drowns audience members, the character brings up
Bakhtin's theories of the novel: 'the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.' Of course he wrote that way back in 1941 and meant the new world then, the one around him, post-Industrial Revolution, post-atomic theory, and not the new world now, around me, with all its newer newness, among which the New Avocado. I suppose this means we'd need a newer genre now? One of Bakhtin's contemporaries said that a book is a machine for thinking. So what kind of machine do we need?
The "New Avocado", an avocado created without the pit, a story about which the character heard on the radio, seems to me to stand in here for the changes humanity has and is making to nature through scientific/technological methods. Particularly climate change. In this new Anthropocene era, I think the text is saying, our conception of the novel from an earlier time, and the Realist mode particularly I'd assume, is outdated, and we need to play around with finding a new one.
Is that what this book is "about"? I don't know, probably there are numerous things one could take from reading it. It's a bit of a grab-bag, even if the pieces sometimes relate to another piece somewhere. It seems an excellent subject for reader-response theory analysis; this is what I make of it, who cares what the author intended!
But if Dutton is experimenting with finding a new form, she seems to be leaning here towards incorporating surrealism, nonfiction, physical spaces, collage, and paying specific attention to habituated details to shake the reader up. Her first section, Prairie, consists of 5 short stories, 4 of them previously published, which downgrade plot in favor of describing the physical environment of their settings and have dreamlike, surreal air. They also possess an ominous feeling, such as a person worried about the coming effects of climate change might feel.
The Dresses section fits with what she describes in the Art section as her interests in "things" and in the critic Shklovsky's idea that art should make the habitual strange to us so that we can look at aspects of life anew and feel things again. Does this have relation to an idea that humans being habituated to, complacent with, our way of life and the changing climate presents an existential danger that we need to be shaken out of? Pay new attention to the world around you! To prairies and lakes and hillsides, yes, but also to dresses. In Other she intermixes pieces of fiction and nonfiction.
This is academic writing, I don't think that Ellman review in the NYT can be said to be wrong about that. It does not care for plot. It cares for intellect. Reading it was generally an interesting experience for me more than an enjoyable one, other than the Prairie section, whose stories I did generally "enjoy", which alas seems a rather low-brow criterion with which to judge this text.
December 28, 2025
~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*experimental essays are prairies, okay~*~*~*~*~*~~*~~~*~~**~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~**~*~*~*~*~*
“—the job of art is to make the world strange so that we might see it again rather than simply recognizing it out of habit.” … “It is when the world is strange, or when I am awake to its strangeness, that I am most compelled to write.”
“—the job of art is to make the world strange so that we might see it again rather than simply recognizing it out of habit.” … “It is when the world is strange, or when I am awake to its strangeness, that I am most compelled to write.”
May 1, 2024
Very good
August 18, 2024
We make machines to remember what we loved
April 27, 2024
I’m that special kind of Philistine: I don’t read very much poetry (although I’d like to). My reason is that I’m a very literal person: I’m science-trained, and that’s become my approach to literature and to art, too. Cause, effect. It’s a challenge when it comes to surrealist and experimental writing, and was likely why I struggled at first with Dutton’s collection.
But, like with some poetry and a lot of surrealism, the more I got into Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, the more I liked it. It began to work on me. I’m a big fan of quirk (no matter what I declared above), and I like patterns, both of which are in this collection (—and the divide between science and art is a false dichotomy, anyway). Also, mystery. Each of the words in the title is a separate section n the book. Prairie is complicated, but it’s about women, and fear, and motherhood, and love, and loss, in soaring language and beautiful landscapes. It’s also very spooky, and disorienting, about that liminal place between daily life and terror. (Women write this so well!) Dresses is much more approachable, extracting sections from much-loved literature (I found it delightful). Art explores translation through the relationship between literature and visual art. Other is about writing, and Kant, and anxiety, and Rivera Garza, and also a play that plunges readers, if they’d gotten complacent, right back into surreality.
Is this collection for everyone? Probably not, but nothing is. I read it in one sitting, and enjoyed many of the trips it took me on. Someone (I don’t remember who) once said the point of poetry is language, and Dutton has an amazing facility with making word pictures. Someone else said to thumb your nose at those who want high-brow interpretation of poetry (and art, and everything else) because the point is in how and whether it speaks to you. So, although I wish I had an MFA so I can tell you about all of the symbolism and other mysterious things in here, maybe it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes art is pretty, and inexplicable, and you must approach it with humility; and that’s quite alright.
Many thanks to Coffee House Press and to Edelweiss for early access.
But, like with some poetry and a lot of surrealism, the more I got into Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, the more I liked it. It began to work on me. I’m a big fan of quirk (no matter what I declared above), and I like patterns, both of which are in this collection (—and the divide between science and art is a false dichotomy, anyway). Also, mystery. Each of the words in the title is a separate section n the book. Prairie is complicated, but it’s about women, and fear, and motherhood, and love, and loss, in soaring language and beautiful landscapes. It’s also very spooky, and disorienting, about that liminal place between daily life and terror. (Women write this so well!) Dresses is much more approachable, extracting sections from much-loved literature (I found it delightful). Art explores translation through the relationship between literature and visual art. Other is about writing, and Kant, and anxiety, and Rivera Garza, and also a play that plunges readers, if they’d gotten complacent, right back into surreality.
Is this collection for everyone? Probably not, but nothing is. I read it in one sitting, and enjoyed many of the trips it took me on. Someone (I don’t remember who) once said the point of poetry is language, and Dutton has an amazing facility with making word pictures. Someone else said to thumb your nose at those who want high-brow interpretation of poetry (and art, and everything else) because the point is in how and whether it speaks to you. So, although I wish I had an MFA so I can tell you about all of the symbolism and other mysterious things in here, maybe it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes art is pretty, and inexplicable, and you must approach it with humility; and that’s quite alright.
Many thanks to Coffee House Press and to Edelweiss for early access.
May 4, 2024
I bought this book after it was brought to my attention by its publisher in the US -- Coffee House Press -- and I am glad I did.
This book falls into no genre. It is essay and fiction and non-fiction and memoir and short stories. It is about art and books and prairies and dreams and scary by the campfire stories. There are 4 sections of unequal length -- Prairie, Dresses, Art, and Other.
The Prairie part has 5 essays/stories. In Lost Lunar Apogee I learned about Mina Loy, someone whose poetry I should try.
The Dresses part, which I really liked, includes 66 paragraphs (actually 65 paragraphs) about 66 dresses of one sort or other that have been taken from 65 books, i.e., written by 65 different authors. The list of authors and books follows the 65 paragraphs. It was fun to look back at the descriptions once knowing who wrote the description and the book it came from, especially if it was a book I'd read.
The Art part was the best. Dutton's opening paragraph had me: Ostensibly I write novels and stories, yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is astonishing. I want to ask: How might fiction be conceived of as a space within which we attend to the world? A way of opening spaces--prairies, paragraphs, rooms-- in which the world can occur? How might a story embody a specific way of looking? By looking I mean seeing, but I also mean a way of being in relation to the world, a politics of attention. Dutton spends much of this part talking about "ekphrastic writing," a new concept for me, also calling it "writing in response to art." It was fascinating, especially when she highlights it with the debate about how translators should work -- exact translations or capturing the experience.
The Other part has 9 pieces of writing. Some fiction, some non-fiction. I loved the very short story called Writing Advice and the one act play called A Pool of Tears, which seems to have many meanings.
This book falls into no genre. It is essay and fiction and non-fiction and memoir and short stories. It is about art and books and prairies and dreams and scary by the campfire stories. There are 4 sections of unequal length -- Prairie, Dresses, Art, and Other.
The Prairie part has 5 essays/stories. In Lost Lunar Apogee I learned about Mina Loy, someone whose poetry I should try.
The Dresses part, which I really liked, includes 66 paragraphs (actually 65 paragraphs) about 66 dresses of one sort or other that have been taken from 65 books, i.e., written by 65 different authors. The list of authors and books follows the 65 paragraphs. It was fun to look back at the descriptions once knowing who wrote the description and the book it came from, especially if it was a book I'd read.
The Art part was the best. Dutton's opening paragraph had me: Ostensibly I write novels and stories, yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is astonishing. I want to ask: How might fiction be conceived of as a space within which we attend to the world? A way of opening spaces--prairies, paragraphs, rooms-- in which the world can occur? How might a story embody a specific way of looking? By looking I mean seeing, but I also mean a way of being in relation to the world, a politics of attention. Dutton spends much of this part talking about "ekphrastic writing," a new concept for me, also calling it "writing in response to art." It was fascinating, especially when she highlights it with the debate about how translators should work -- exact translations or capturing the experience.
The Other part has 9 pieces of writing. Some fiction, some non-fiction. I loved the very short story called Writing Advice and the one act play called A Pool of Tears, which seems to have many meanings.
October 10, 2024
Several months later and this hasn't stuck with me-- some fiction, some non-fiction. I get the desire to put work in a compilation but a more unifying theme would be helpful.
August 9, 2024
In "Writing Advice," a short piece toward the end of this book that reads like nonfiction until it suddenly doesn't, one writer tells another to "write something with a real story and get it over two hundred pages" as opposed to "writing little books that nobody reads." I, for one, quite like Danielle Dutton's "little books," and am glad to have read this one, which contains writing in a number of forms—stories, and essays, and a one-act play, and a piece that consists entirely of quotes from other books about dresses. (I really liked that piece—seeing which quotes I recognized or whose provenance I could guess, including one from Samuel Pepys and another from a Sweet Valley High book, seeing the ones that were from books I'd read even though I didn't remember the quote, seeing the ones from books I've been meaning to read, seeing the ones from books or authors I've never heard of.) Elsewhere in the book, Dutton's reference points include artists and authors whose work I enjoy, from Agnès Varda (The Beaches of Agnès is forever in my list of top-five films) to Lydia Davis to Georges Perec to Agnes Martin. This book has big lit-crit energy (which Lucy Ellmann complains about in her NY Times review of this) but that isn't a negative for me, even though it's been literally decades since I read anything by Viktor Shklovsky or Mikhail Bakhtin. I like the mood of the book a lot, the way different pieces have strong elements of disorientation or unease, without the book as a whole feeling too queasy or too much of a downer.
Highlights for me: the list of kinds of light in "Installation" (which Deb Olin Unferth quotes part of in her review in The Believer), and the entirety of My Wonderful Description of Flowers, which was originally published in The New Yorker. Oh, and One Woman and Two Great Men, which is about Kant and Thomas de Quincey and Fleur Jaeggy, and made me remember how I enjoyed Jaeggy's book These Possible Lives and have been meaning to read more by her for ages.
Highlights for me: the list of kinds of light in "Installation" (which Deb Olin Unferth quotes part of in her review in The Believer), and the entirety of My Wonderful Description of Flowers, which was originally published in The New Yorker. Oh, and One Woman and Two Great Men, which is about Kant and Thomas de Quincey and Fleur Jaeggy, and made me remember how I enjoyed Jaeggy's book These Possible Lives and have been meaning to read more by her for ages.
July 21, 2025
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton is a collage of genres and themes… and the strange. The way art makes what has grown familiar strange, to, as Dutton quotes Shklovsky, ‘make the world strange so that we might see it again rather than simply recognizing it out of habit’.
Prairie is a cycle of slightly surreal stories set in the American prairie. Dresses is a collection of dresses in fiction from Tolstoy to Fleur Jaeggy. Art is an essay about the interplay of visual art and fiction, ekphrastic writing and translation, possibly the heart of this book. Other is a little bit of everything, short stories that leaned towards the essayistic with Woolf, Ann Quin, Cristina Rivera Garza, Shklovsky, and others making frequent appearances.
It is fragmentary, sometimes brilliant and sometimes nonsensical and more often intentionally somewhere between the two, pushing the boundaries of fiction and what it can do and the spaces it can open.
Prairie is a cycle of slightly surreal stories set in the American prairie. Dresses is a collection of dresses in fiction from Tolstoy to Fleur Jaeggy. Art is an essay about the interplay of visual art and fiction, ekphrastic writing and translation, possibly the heart of this book. Other is a little bit of everything, short stories that leaned towards the essayistic with Woolf, Ann Quin, Cristina Rivera Garza, Shklovsky, and others making frequent appearances.
It is fragmentary, sometimes brilliant and sometimes nonsensical and more often intentionally somewhere between the two, pushing the boundaries of fiction and what it can do and the spaces it can open.
Read
April 17, 2025not allowed the rate this cause I don’t understand it. I have never read anything like this book. I thought it was super interesting, unique and a work of art, but I was lost. My sister got it for me at a bookstore in the “blind date with a book section” it was covered in brown paper with a wheel graph labeling- haunting, surreal, wild-west, weird, beautiful- “wow, I have never read anything like this”
agreed.
agreed.
July 4, 2024
I am floored by this innovative and inspiring collection from Dutton. Her prose moves me as though by magic. There are some stories here that float along some mystic current of warm air, like everything in the Prairie section, Acorn, and Writing Advice. Decidedly my shit.
I'm so happy to be introduced to prototype press! I'll be returning to explore more of their catalogue.
I'm so happy to be introduced to prototype press! I'll be returning to explore more of their catalogue.
January 24, 2025
At first I really wasn’t sure what I was doing here, in the dreamscape of the disappearing prairie. It wasn’t until “An Essay Held Us Captive” that I felt held by the collection/able to hold. Reading this while watching Twin Peaks, I feel entirely captivated by this Lynchian feeling that is present in Dutton’s work.
May 11, 2024
I'll be honest, I consider myself a smart gal, but this book was too smart for me. I still loved it though - particularly the essay on fiction and art, and the various explorations on how climate change/ecological collapse informs fiction
June 15, 2024
i bought this to read dresses (💓💓💓) but prairie, art, and other were equally outstanding. the most stunning writing & brilliant thoughts about art begetting art. “to want for nothing” will stick with me for a long time!!
extra excited about the fleur jaeggy & mother ann lee references
extra excited about the fleur jaeggy & mother ann lee references
Read
November 22, 2024I think my favorite was the "Art" section
December 1, 2024
Loved Dresses and Art, need more convincing on Prairies and Other.
June 8, 2025
4.5/5 stars
January 21, 2025
Such an arresting way with language.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 92 reviews