Danielle Dutton

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 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

Fiction. An absurdly comic and decidedly 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. 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--this novel takes us deep into the familiar and to its very edge.

Sprawl

Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the pieces in Danielle Dutton's 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 Everybodys Autobiography), Duttons 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 writers and readers) 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.

Attempts at a Life

"oI am as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; though I cannot beHenry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to beMargaret the First.o When Margaret Cavendish addressed the Royal Society, Samuel Pepys recorded that her dress was oso antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at allo. And indeed, here vividly reimagined by Danielle Dutton, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century duchess is wholly ounordinaryo, and all the better for it. Exiled to Paris at the start of the English Civil War, Margaret meets and marries William Cavendish and, with his encouragement, begins publishing volumes of poetry and philosophy, which soon become the talk of the town in London. After Cromwell's defeat, upon their return to England, Margaret's infamy grows. She causes controversy wherever she goes, once attending the theatre with breasts bared, and earns herself the nickname oMad Madgeo. Yet while scorned by many, to others Margaret is a visionary, and to later readers - including Virginia Woolf - she was to become an early precursor of feminism. She was the first woman to speak at the Royal Society - and the last for 200 years - and the first to write explicitly for publication. Unjustly neglected by history, Margaret the First - as she styled herself - was a bright, shining paradox. Here, she is brought intimately and memorably to life, tumbling pell-mell across the pages of this invigorating depiction of a woman whose ambitions, and marriage, were often centuries ahead of her time."

Richard Kraft

In this wildly irreverent collage narrative, Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft reassembles a pre-perestroika era comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis, orchestrating a multiplicity of voices into joyous cacophony. Like an Indian miniature painting, each comic book page is densely layered, collapsing foreground and background, breaking the frame and merging time. An enormous cast of characters emerges as Kraft appropriates images and texts from an extraordinary variety of sources (the Amar Chitra Katha comics of Hindu mythology, Jimmy Swaggart's Old and New Testament stories, the 1960s English football annual "Scorcher, " underground porn comics like "Cherry," images from art history, outdated encyclopedias and more). Kraft constructs a world constantly in flux, rich with dark humor and revelatory nonsense. Writer Danielle Dutton's set of 16 interpolations punctuate the book using similar strategies of appropriation and juxtaposition to create texts that sing in the same arresting register as Kraft's collages. "Here Comes Kitty" also includes a conversation between poet Ann Lauterbach and artist Richard Kraft.

Danielle Dutton

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