Danielle Dutton, S P R A W L
, Siglio Press, 2010."Absurdly comic and decidedly digressive, S P R A W L chronicles the mercurial inner life of one suburban woman. With vertiginous energy and a deadpan eye, the narrator records the seeming uniformity of her world—the dissolving marriage, crumbs on the countertop, the drunken neighbor careening into the pool, a dead dog on the side of the road—constructing surprising taxonomies that rearrange the banalities, small wonders, and accouterments of suburban life. As the abundance and debris accumulate, the sameness of suburbia gives way to enthralling strangeness. We suddenly feel the force of orbit when only moments before the world felt infinitely flat.
Inspired by a series of domestic still lifes by photographer Laura Letinsky, Dutton creates her own trenchant series of tableaux, attentive to the surfaces of the suburbs and the ways in which life there is willfully, almost desperately, on display. In locating the language of sprawl itself—engrossing, unremitting, ever expansive—Dutton has written an astonishing work of fiction that takes us deep into the familiar and to its very edge: nothing is ever the same under such close inspection."
"Dutton's mini-masterpiece—a womanly treatise on suburban decay and fatigued love—is a triumph! Each sentence should be celebrated for its hilarity, rigor, eccentricity, and passion. S P R A W L is the work of a brilliant mind." - Deb Olin Unferth
"Just when it appeared that suburbia was going to be strangled in its own entrails, a victim of peak oil, collapsing infrastructure, and credit card debt, here comes Danielle Dutton to show us how magical that sprawl is after all. The magic is in the oddities of the particular, the cat that "doesn't matter so much as the feelings its tiny feet feel." Dutton's S P R A W L is a different kind of sprawling: it reaches forth, takes up, and redeems. Here, the same old is something else again. As she writes, "Prepare to Merge!" - Curtis White
"Dutton's groundbreaking S P R A W L . . . jams Lisa Robertson's intelligence and music into a Jane Austen-ish scrutiny of the manner of being in those new landscapes we continue to call "suburbs." - Matthew Stadler
"Danielle Dutton’s S P R A W L reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia. Dutton’s unnamed housewife roams sidewalks and manicured lawns like one of Benjamin’s flaneurs, reminiscent of the contemporary urban walkers of Renee Gladman’s stories or Gail Scott’s My Paris. But this novel is like other works, and it is not—it is both unabashedly voracious in terms of literary sources and an extraordinarily original text.
While in her first book, the remarkable collection Attempts at a Life, Dutton lifted language from other literary works as collage, in S P R A W L other texts pop up as allusion or inspiration, in the names of books or characters. Sources include Gertrude Stein novels; Lyn Hejinian in “Two Stein Talks”; an article on “Tupperware: Suburbia, sociality and mass consumption”; Laura Riding in Anarchism Is Not Enough; Roland Barthes in “The World as Object”; and A Pictorial Encyclopedia of Modern Cake Decorating. As in Attempts at a Life, Dutton pays homage to female literary characters, particularly wives, from Woolf’s Clarissa D. to Emma and Alice B." - Kate Zambreno
"Dutton’s archly comic first novel (after story collection Attempts at a Life) forms, literally, a block of prose: the book itself is nearly square in shape, and the story consists of a single long paragraph. The unnamed narrator lives in a sprawling suburb with her husband, Haywood. In lieu of a conventional plot, there’s a series of observations and reveries, prompted by such events as the narrator and Haywood seeing a movie in which the blonde heroine says "magnificent" as her "eyes shine with tears." Elsewhere, the narrator shares the minute rituals of a pet cat, has a 19th-century daydream inspired by a sunny morning, and dissects her appearance in a mirror and the dinner on a table. As the narrative proceeds, some change is seen, largely in Haywood’s disillusion with marriage and with his wife’s increasingly brittle musings. This experimental novel is best read in a single sitting and, like the photographs that inspired it, can be viewed in any number of ways, with a different effect each time." - Publishers Weekly
"In her essay “Photography: A Little Summa” Susan Sontag wrote, “To be modern is to live, entranced, by the savage autonomy of the detail.” She’s talking specifically about seeing, about how photographs, being themselves details, “seem like life.” Every percussive sentence of Danielle Dutton’s witty debut, Sprawl, a novel riffing, among other things, on “domestic still life” photographs by Laura Letinsky, is an autonomous detail. These details, these sentences, do not so much accumulate or build as, well, sprawl, while story eddies underneath, a current under a surface littered with bobbing disposables, pictures of a life’s objects, be they material or psychic. If, like the commodities she describes, such details seem at once to describe and cancel history, they also advance an interiority whose innerseam is inseparable from landscape-as-market, which is to say, the American mind as a sensual, internal elaboration of objects.
The accretion of these kinds of sentences, each one a “line of flight” to use an outmoded phrase, rather than a cause leading inexorably to an effect, alters our experience of time. Dutton eschews forward motion for concentric ripples.
The narrator, an astute and highly intelligent joker, caustically if resignedly skeptical—“I do it and say, ‘I doubt it.’” — is complicit in the bloated and charming excesses she is also ironic about. The event, the “plot” as such, is mostly about the mental consequences of living in a politically and mentally immature culture. Where conformism, consumption, privilege, aesthetics, and assimilation are the modus operandi, the political disappears and time seems to flatten out, reduced to a decoratively paved digestive system. In the satirical tradition, the first-person narrator of Sprawl is fully of the folly she articulates, more or less consciously.
The primary rhetorical devices here are irony and compression, for example, of metonymy and complicity: “Babies stand in the water in plastic diapers.” It’s not just that plastic diapers near water stands for oceanic pollution. It’s that oceanic pollution stands for human extinction and thus so do babies: birth is death?
As J. M. Coetzee wrote of Kafka’s “The Burrow,” in Sprawl, time stops, “one moment does not flow into the next — on the contrary, each moment has the threat or promise of being… a timeless forever, unconnected to, ungenerated by, the past.” Burrowing is the opposite of sprawling, though both indicate at once threats of incursion and strategies of expansion. While both verbs are also nouns, Dutton’s sprawl is unspecified, lacks the article, and is, thus, everywhere at once, viral, ever encroaching upon habitats, an over-exposed car-and-lawn-centric placeless-place, the inevitable result of the logic of eternal “growth” and its twin, over-consumption." - Miranda Mellis
"The metaphor of sprawl serves Dutton well. In this brief, winding novel, Dutton peers into the open spaces of a flatlined suburban life. The narrator of the story, a woman clearly at odds with her surroundings, begins: “This place is as large as any other town,” not bothering to distinguish it further than that. She and her husband don’t quite fit into the idealized roles they’ve set for themselves: “He is angry because he was raised to be a substantial Protestant, with stories of utility to tell the women, and relevance.” Mostly, Haywood just passes offstage: a closing door or a floor creak in the distance.
In the long line of novels about the vapidity of suburbia, Dutton’s has a narrator who may be one of the most likable. Aloof and hilarious, she dissects their lives with the casualness of a cynical scientist: “A lot of these dilemmas aren’t ever solved. They’re like rotting fruit concealed beneath their own sweet smell... This is further emphasized by Haywood’s new beard, which is representative of a lost tradition of safety and justice.” Insights like these are interspersed with notes on the detritus of her life and a fascination with her cat. The reader, then, is invited to peer into the open spaces between the narrator’s sentences. Is there pain there? It mostly reads as resignation. Perhaps novelist Deb Olin Unferth, who blurbed the book, put it better than we ever could, calling it “a womanly treatise on suburban decay and fatigued love.” Fatigued. It’s not that nothing is progressing, it’s that it’s taking a lot of forced effort to get anywhere." - Jonathan Messinger
"At the heart of Danielle Dutton's Sprawl is a lavish, endless list of domestic objects: water pitchers, sweaters, cakes on cake stands, petunias in a terra-cotta pot. Borrowing techniques from both fiction, poetry, and visual art (particularly photography), the book not only infuses each object, be it a juice glass or a paper napkin, with a Vermeeresque glow but arranges it into part of a verbal still life. The result? A fresh take on suburbia, one of reverence and skepticism.
In terms of plot, the book follows the crumbling marriage of the nameless narrator. At night, her husband "makes creaking noises in some other part of the house" while she "resists the anti-rhetorical impulse to hurl paranoid, prefabricated abuse his way." The couple still go to dinner with other couples, still have sex after watching television, but for the narrator, a wry sense of loss has taken over her life. Reflecting on her furniture, she notes, with a hint of unbalance, "Several of my tabletops are tilted for better locating the center of my domestic charisma." Overall, the marriage plot becomes merely a hum under a symphony of observations and formal experiments.
Dutton, you'll quickly notice, does not use paragraph breaks. Though this may at first seem overwhelming, the book is highly, highly structured. The author uses three organized, recurring strands of thought: the domestic still lifes ("Meanwhile, a copper pot on its side sends a gleaming reddish glow onto a honeydew melon"), imaginary letters to neighbors ("Dear Mrs. Leslie, Take heed. Certain people have become married, certain streets have become diversified, certain birds continue to peck"), and exchanges of cropped dialogue ("Haywood says 'Fill in the blank." He says 'Refreshing' and 'Obvious' and 'Bacon'"). The narrator weaves these three strands together, in and out, adding a dash of action (finding a dead squirrel in the gutter or confronting her husband's affair), which moves the story forward even as it stays still—a technique that nicely encapsulates the motion/nonmotion of the narrator's life.
Only the cropped dialogue fails to captivate. Dawn Raffel uses this kind of dialogue to hushed, grim effect in similar yet bleaker domestic settings (see: In the Year of Long Division). In Dutton's case, however, it feels frustratingly cryptic and out of place, in light of the book's overall transparency. The beauty of Sprawl resides in its fierce, careful composition, which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.
Sprawl in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection. "One hardly sees oneself," the narrator says. "For example, one never sees one's own eyes." The humor and pathos, the intelligent and unexpected point of view, are why we keep reading along with Dutton, even as her narrator "makes all sorts of ordinary choices" and "campaigns hard with cheese-pimento sandwiches." - Leigh Newman
"It was Maupassant, I think, who wrote something to the effect that the greatest challenge facing the artist is to see familiar things with new eyes. With S P R A W L, Danielle Dutton has accomplished the minor miracle of seeing the suburbs in a fresh way - and in the process reinvigorates an exhausted genre. Her attention to the overlooked and insignificant opens before us, suburbanites and city-dwellers alike, a vision of a corner of the world that proves the marvelous is always at hand, if only we’re willing to see it. A beautiful book." - Green Apple Books in San Francisco
"While walking those safe and sterile streets at night and crossing my neighbors' perfect lawns, I felt—or maybe assumed—that their whole world was empty and that nothing was going on even in the minds of the people inside their homes. While living there I was always comforted by the idea that the lives of neighbors were as empty as they seemed. But Dutton has filled all of the supposed emptiness of suburbia with a flood of thought and feeling. Her protagonist's powerful stream of consciousness peeks inward and outward, bringing her marriage, her world, and herself in powerfully shifting focus, as if she was passing everything around her under a microscope for the span of a second. This is a truly disturbing book... and it makes me damn nervous." - 57th Street Books / Chicago
"S P R A W L is a novel form of writing that comprises a single layer of sentences arranged in a flat suburban lattice. Even though Sprawl is uniformly one sentence thick, the sentences cohere with exponential strength and are super conductive of awareness of emotions, bodies and things. The narrator behind the work is an advanced sexual being, capable of receiving great heat and dispersing it... [She] is the apotheosis of a suburban goddess, childless, very interested in what she likes and what you or someone else likes: she is the biotech blend of Circe and Athena and the formidable American woman. She employs literary terrorism to achieve genitive consequences. Can a goddess masturbate in a garden and make the flowers grow? She can. Reading S P R A W L, I want to fall in love with a flesh and blood American woman poet and be newborn." - Spoonbill & Sugartown / Brooklyn
Danielle Dutton, Attempts at a Life
, Tarpaulin Sky, 2007."Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the pieces in Attempts at a Life, though nominally stories, might indeed be thought of as “attempts.” They do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises, but rather than bring these worlds to some sort of neat conclusion, they constantly push out towards something new. In “S&M,” a marriage suffers from “the words you were always missing: sky, loft, music, dogs, pipes, puppets, war.” In “Mary Carmichael,” a woman with a pair of scissors and the need to “cut out her insatiable desire” slices “a veiled hat from a fern in a pot” and “a river out of a postbox.” Like the “experiments in found movement” one character conducts (in “Everybody’s Autobiography”), Dutton’s stories find movement wherever they turn, in every phrase and cadence, 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, and she recalculates the lives of her numerous heroines to assert the busy and the broken." — Robert Glück
"Danielle Dutton writes with a deft explosiveness that craters the page with stunning, unsettling precision. Here “car lights like licorice whips slick the road outside the window,” there “the puffed-thumb Emma person” sways and falls, and everywhere “the firelight is orange against the midnight of the ocean.” Her marvelous, generous Attempts at a Life proves that, like Gertrude Stein, she knows how to be “at once talking and listening.” — Laird Hunt
"A dizzying turn of sentences... a palpable intensity... playful, yet precise.... marks Dutton as the descendent of the modernist portraits by--and of--both Stein and Pablo Picasso, as handed down through Language poetry, prose poetry and experimental fiction lineages." - Rain Taxi
"She recontextualizes the gothic setting. The ruined estate becomes language itself... It’s serious, but as many dramatists celebrate: comedy orbits a dark sun. Which is to say, this is also a very funny book." - American Book Review
"A compelling, enigmatic read. Ideal for readers of the fiction and the literary essay alike, Danielle Dutton's new book is a significant contribution to contemporary experimental writing." - Dogmatika
"With a dizzying turn of sentences, Danielle Dutton uses Gertrude Stein’s technique of “insistence” (also known as repetition) to create a palpable intensity, and the playful, yet precise simplicity of the word choice in her debut collection, Attempts at a Life, marks Dutton as the descendent of the modernist portraits by—and of—both Stein and Pablo Picasso, as handed down through Language poetry, prose poetry and experimental fiction lineages.
Dutton’s piece, The Portrait of a Lady, begins with the following paragraph: “I was a tomboy and fought on open fields. The days passed unmarked and I called them: Mrs. Days. ‘She is a different child!’ I heard the women say even as they were forgetting me. And while my sisters practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp, I stood on the battlefield with what I thought was a gun in my hand, but it turned out to be a bright green bird. Thankfully, an opportunity arose to chart well-charted republics. I sailed east in front of viewers. With body erect I sniffed the air, tilted generously with numerous impressions. Someone said: ‘If there is a wound then bacteria or peroxide will take care of it one way or another.’ I heard someone say: ‘Bring your body closer. Bring up your five parts.’ But I was the dancing girl for my own army after all, and a vixen.”
By contrasting the “Lady” of the title with the first-person revelation that the portrait’s subject was a “tomboy,” Dutton echoes Stein’s wonderfully gossipy sense of humor. Because we encounter this work as fiction (as it is labeled) we must ask ourselves whether we are dealing with an unreliable narrator or merely charming candor. However, Dutton’s choice of the preposition “on” rather than the expected “in” shows an author willing to manipulate word choice with a poet’s sensibility in order to create her desired effect. In this case, the preposition “on” creates a physical surface that simultaneously illustrates the condensed passage of time that we are about to experience, as well as the girl’s inability to assimilate properly, as a “lady” would, to her surroundings. The rest of the paragraph reaffirms that we are dealing with a narrator who is—if anything—reliable to a fault. Her outsider status, that of a “different child” and a “tomboy” in a household populated by sisters who “practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp,” hint to us that this narrator uses the label “lady” as both an ironic term and a title she has appropriated for herself. She is a self-described “dancing girl” and “vixen” who has traveled the world in order to “chart well-charted republics” and she has returned to bring this knowledge to her well-heeled but dull kin: A lady is a lady who says she is a lady. Additionally, Dutton’s subtle repetition of “chart” and “charted” and “bring” and “bring” in this short passage, utilize Stein’s “insistence” technique to reinforce the narrator’s progression through years and landscapes.
In section after section in Attempts at a Life, Danielle Dutton executes expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops streaking the windows of the last un-gentrified house in an old Victorian neighborhood. While Attempts at a Life may not present us with a fully formed artist in the mold of Stein and Picasso, it most certainly introduces an important new literary voice." - Peter Conners
"Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life is an extended meditation on the pleasures of reading—primarily that vicarious experience of trying on the lives of the characters that one encounters in fiction. The book begins with the poem “Jane Eyre,” a stripped down version of the familiar novel, in which the basic outlines of the plot and character are presented with quick and careful sketching:
It started out I was hungry and smaller than most. Not pretty, but passable. Rest easy, for this is not another story about a girl and her father; I never even knew mine.
The poem continues with the same remarkable ease that it begins with. The poem is ultimately less about the experience of reading Jane Eyre than the experience of re-reading Jane Eyre—the poem moves forward with an intimacy that can border on fatigue (familiarity breeds what, dear reader?)—but the final effect is something that’s hard to describe. It’s not quite elegiac, although it does have that slight obituary quality of covering the full life in a tiny space. It’s also not quite exhaustive, although it does dip into all of the crucial contours of the novel. It’s most like love—the way that something familiar and known can continue to excite past the point of discovery. That the fact of the beloved remains a source of wonder even after it has ceased to be a source of surprise.
Her poems often approach familiar texts by condensing the personality of the characters. One of the strangest things about trying to talk about Dutton’s work is that everything I want to say sounds like an insult, but I don’t mean it that way. For instance, her poems often feel like what remains you with you long after you’ve read the book—the personality and the plot boiled down to its most basic outlines—but it’s actually a rather serious accomplishment. Her aims here are quite modest, but represent a kind of embodiment that I think is quite difficult to accomplish, where she manages to strip down certain texts to a kind of embodied personality or core. Why can’t I praise someone for thoroughly making a modest achievement? Why doesn’t that sound like real praise?
As the book moves forward, it becomes clear that Dutton is not only exploring the vicarious pleasures of reading—she is also discovering the limitations of those pleasures. The selves of the poems begin to shatter as the book moves on, and how could they not when the second poem is composed of collaged lines from Celine? There’s the knowledge here that trying on other people’s lives is dangerous and shattering stuff. Once the boundaries of the real and the fictional start being crossed, there’s a way that the self is in danger, and Dutton manages to work these transformations and breaking with great ease. The poem “Landscapes” ends:
“Oh, dear me! I’m sorry to hear that,” said the literary gentleman in a shocked tone.
It’s a playful rebuke to the reader at the same moment that it invokes the clichés of hastily written novels. The collection touches on a number of authors—Alice James, Louis Zukofsky, Sappho, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and others. But each of them are incorporated by Dutton’s voice. She’s able to work with their material while keeping her own authorial voice vibrant and clear.
Having been seduced by the familiar, I found myself able to enjoy Dutton’s more disorienting and disjointed work. The tone of the final poem “Sprung” is clear, even if the subject matter is not:
Once upon a hard-pressed twiggy stuff, under spectacles of small trees, a gorgeous modern promiscuity made a pretty rare bird. “With respect to your work,” said the congregation of men at a useless festival under a hard-to-think sky, “Hey, death shaves me sideways under an anarchy root. Just pull a thread so the world can worship the dictatorship of the Warblers.”
The poem continues in this manner, using “material,” the notes inform us, “from William Carlos Williams’s ‘Spring and All.’” It’s a fitting tribute to Williams’s explosive and fascinating volume, much of which is concerned with finding the boundary between poetry and prose. I think that Williams would approve of these as poems—particularly for their refusal of pure exposition in favor of what he might call “imagination.”
The back cover of the book unequivocally demands that it be shelved with Fiction (that charming “keyword” in the upper left hand corner), although the copy from the press begins by telling us that these pieces are, “Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory…” Even without Williams, I would want to claim these pieces firmly as prose poems—in large part because of the way that poetry has become the big tent where everything that doesn’t fit somewhere else is welcome. To the extent that these poems live in the realm of what we now call “theory”—it’s a remarkably friendly version of the term. Most of us who spend time doing/reading “literary theory” know it is a somewhat prickly terrain, full of untranslatable French (“jouissance” anyone?), arcanely nuanced distinction (Foucault is not an existentialist because he believes that power precedes the subject), and gleefully pronounced paradox. Dutton is certainly at home in a theoretical universe—one could discuss many of these poems—and quite profitably, I think—in terms of contemporary literary theory. However, Dutton’s work is incredibly inviting—she’s able to inhabit the insights of theory and then perform them without having to get bogged down in the sort of jargon or explanation that might deter the general reader (whoever you are). Dutton’s work is “accessible” in the best way possible. She’s working at a remarkably high level of insight while still inviting you to enjoy yourself.
Confession: I’m almost seven months behind on this review. Why? Because I find these poems as hard to talk about as I find them pleasant to read. Who said that poetry is always pressing forward the boundaries of what can be thought and said? I think she’d be glad to see that it’s still true." - Jason Schneiderman
"There are heroines in Danielle Dutton’s work, some of the novel’s biggest—Hester Prynne, Emma Bovary, and Jane Eyre among them—and Dutton’s retelling of their stories, though only a portion of the book, gives Attemps at a Life its center. These are characters known for their confinement by societal forces at least partially, and inseparably, due to their gender. Hester Prynne has her letter, Bovary her desires, and Eyre her orphaning. And so out of their stories Dutton crafts their alternative dialogue, thrusting them from prim realism and into a poetic consciousness, as if they’ve been given the benefit of having read their own novels. Prynne: “Who is afraid of me? Even light runs from me. I run after.” Emma Bovary, whose doesn’t get a monologue exactly but a neat summary of her story that Dutton cherry picks until it has a consciousness: “In the highway. In the garden. To poke stuck waste, wept nights, was pregnant.”
And then there is Jane Eyre’s, which begins the book, starting everything off on a note of powerless misfortune and savvy awareness: “It started out I was smaller than most. Not pretty, but passable. Rest easy, for this is not another story about a girl and her father; I never even knew mine.” Eyre’s story, condensed like astronaut ice cream to four pages, takes the familiar path here—Rochester is blinded and in the end they wed—but the narrator’s immediacy is intense and the prose is cutting:
It is love and it is (as he explained it) as though a string were tied from his lowest left rib to mine and would, upon separation of too many miles or months, bring forth wrenching internal bleeding, or death.
The image is found in the original, but much in the way a flag appears in a Jasper Johns painting or a hit from the 60s finds its way into a hip hop song, Dutton makes it her own not through mimicry but through omission. By straining out the Victorian niceties and putting the words, retold, into Eyre’s mouth makes the visceral body immediate, and love seems to have put the characters, if not their ribs, at risk for a pain different than that for which they are destined. When the separation comes sentences rather than chapters later, the effect is complete and devastating.
Dutton also takes up the pen of authors like Alice James and Virginia Woolf who, surprisingly naturally, fall into a similar intellectual space as the fictional characters. Like the characters, Woolf and James felt the restrictions of their sex in unjust societies (and homes), but here Dutton gives them unbound reign over the page. “Virginia Woolf’s Appendix” is a passage of images which, of course, offers no explanation. “Alice James” is the story of the diarist as a young girl who ends with a knowing joke that “patience…gets me novelists for brothers.” It’s a witty portrait, but the implication is that Alice herself is denied that outcome, and, like Woolf, her growing madness is eventually what confines her.
Dutton’s attraction to these characters and writers seems to be how stunted they are by the world around them, and Dutton crafts them—and her own characters—with tangible, earthy descriptions, firmly bounding the voices to a physical world. When not borrowing classic characters or authors, Dutton builds small stories out of lives similarly subject to the will external forces, and it is this struggle that Attempts at a Life seems to take its title. The titular stories, nine different lives spanning history, take on the ambiguities of the work around them, and one is immediately struck with a mystery of names. To read the pieces here is to take refuge in Dutton’s hard, ecological nouns at the expense of identity. Dutton’s characters, and they are vivid characters, all approach the world as if it were immovable in its construction and the ways it will hurt them. The narrator of “S&M” writes, “What is it to walk away? Love treats my tongue like an oak leaf” but doesn’t walk away. She, like Madame Bovary, like Alice James, is bound by others. Even Jane Eyre, precariously tied at the rib, becomes less the recipient of a happy ending than a life dangled out to the world, incomplete." - Adam Peterson
Danielle Dutton interviewed by Angela Stubbs
Danielle Dutton interviewed by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Danielle Dutton: From A World Called The Blazing World
Danielle Dutton interviewed by Anne K. Yoder
