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siglio's first fiction release
short-listed for The Believer Book Award
The beauty of S P R A W L resides in its fierce, careful composition, which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd. S P R A W L in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection. —BOOKFORUM
$18 Paper 144 pages Fiction ISBN 978-0-9799562-3-2
An absurdly comic and decidely digressive novel, 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.
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.
DANIELLE DUTTON is the author of the short story collection Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky) and editor of Dorothy, a publishing project. Her work has appeared in Bomb, Harper's, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Noon, jubilat, among other journals and magazines. She holds degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the University of Denver where she was Associate Editor of the Denver Quarterly. She has taught writing and literature courses at the School for the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University's Summer Writing Program and the University of Denver. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and is also the book designer for Dalkey Archive Press. Born and raised in California, she now lives with her husband and son in Illinois.
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DEB OLIN UNFERTH: 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.
CURTIS WHITE: 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!"
MATTHEW STADLER: 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."
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