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Search - Attempts at a Life

Attempts at a Life
Author: Danielle Dutton

Listed #2 of "Ten Great Titles from Underground Presses" in Time Out New York — A Small Press Distribution Staff-Pick and Fiction Bestseller for 7 months. 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 ... more »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 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. 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.

--in Rain Taxi, written by Peter Conners 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.

ISBN-13: 9780977901937
ISBN-10: 0977901939
Publication Date: 3/15/2007
Pages: 90
Edition: 1st paperback
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Tarpaulin Sky Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> General >> Contemporary
Religion & Spirituality >> Literature & Fiction >> General

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