Fiction. Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.

Attempts at a Life

Literature & Fiction

Dutton, Danielle

Contemporary

Tarpaulin Sky Press

Inspired by a series of domestic still lifes by photographer Laura Letinsky, Danielle Dutton's absurdly comic and decidedly digressive novel Sprawl chronicles the mercurial inner life of one suburban woman (the dissolving marriage, the crumbs on the countertop, the drunken neighbor careening into the pool, the dead dog on the side of the road), constructing surprising taxonomies that rearrange the banalities, small wonders and accoutrements of contemporary suburban life.

S P R A W L

Humor & Satire

Siglio

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional seventeenth-century duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England; at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London-a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution-and the last for another two hundred years. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

Margaret the First: A Novel

Literary

Tantor Audio

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional seventeenth-century duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England; at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London-a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution-and the last for another two hundred years.    Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Coffee House Press

A meditation on the meaning of text-image collaboration, from the author of Sprawl and Margaret the First Author Danielle Dutton's A Picture Held Us Captive asks what it means for a writer to work "with" someone or something else--to make art in dialogue with an energy not one's own. Dutton (born 1975) explores ekphrastic fiction, looking at a wide range of writers and artists including John Keene and Edgar Degas; Eley Williams and Bridget Riley; Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya; Amina Cain and Bill Viola; Lydia Davis and Joseph Cornell; as well as her own textual responses to visual artists Richard Kraft and Laura Letinsky. A Picture Held Us Captive--which includes a series of images at once illustrative and refusing simple illustration--considers the ways in which ekphrasis operates as a diptych. A work of both commentary and self-reflection, Dutton considers a dialectic between art's ability to make strange what has grown familiar and the writer's desire to make recognizable the experience of one artwork in the space of another. Danielle Dutton is an American writer and the cofounder of the feminist press Dorothy. Born in California in 1975, Dutton now resides in Missouri where she teaches creative writing at Washington University in St Louis. She has authored four books, including Sprawl and Margaret the First. She contributed the text to Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft. Her fiction has appeared in major publications such as the Paris Review, Harper's and Guernica.

A Picture Held Us Captive

Image Text Ithaca Press

Margaret The First

Genre Fiction

Scribe Publications

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when being a writer” was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen’s attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was Mad Madge,” an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of Londona mainstay of the Scientific Revolutionand the last for another two hundred years. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

United States

Catapult

“SPRAWL in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection.” ―Bookforum
“Reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia.” ―The Believer
When Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL first broke upon the world in 2010, critics likened it to collage, a poetics of the suburbs, a literal unpacking of et cetera. This updated edition, with a new afterword by Renee Gladman, reopens the space of SPRAWL’s “fierce, careful composition”―as Bookforum wrote―“which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.”
Today I fell asleep in the tall grass near the old train station. It was a complete picture. A fashionable park. Yet the picture had its sordid and selfish aspect. I can’t seem to say what I mean, Mrs. Barbauld, but with some urgency I mean to inform you what a triumph the big city has become. I am a secular individual but even I can feel the shift in the horizon utterly alien to the constitution of things, the habitual. Sincerely, etc. I move in shade on the edge of a parking lot under walnut trees in the early morning around the edge of a curve in an accidental manner. I walk the sidewalk and ripple the surface of it. From this condition I have a view of the world.
Danielle Dutton is the author of Margaret the First, SPRAWL, and Attempts at a Life. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The White Review, Fence, BOMB, and others. She is on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and is co-founder and editor of the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project.

SPRAWL

Wave Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dutton, Danielle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dutton, Danielle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dutton, Danielle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Attempts at a Life

S P R A W L

Margaret the First: A Novel

Margaret the First: A Novel

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

A Picture Held Us Captive

Margaret The First

Margaret the First: A Novel

SPRAWL