Authors on Tap: Suzanne Scanlon and Danielle Dutton

Please join us in person on Friday, April 26th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate a double-header book launch with Suzanne Scanlon for her new memoir, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, and Danielle Dutton, for her new collection, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other.
About Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen:
When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother--feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain--she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. In the decades it took her to recover from the experience, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something larger: a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-actualization are reduced to "crazy chick" and "madwoman" narratives. It was a thrilling discovery, and she searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shaped her.

Transporting, honest, and graceful, Committed is a story of discovery and recovery, reclaiming the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, and others.
About Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other:
"Luminous" (The Guardian) and "brilliantly odd" (The Irish Independent), Danielle Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling. In the four eponymous sections of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times.

"Prairie" is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest. "Dresses" offers a surprisingly moving portrait of literary fashions. "Art" turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction might relate to one another, a question central to the whole book; while the final section, "Other," includes pieces of irregular ("other") forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious and heartbreaking by turns.

Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness, and indefinable beauty.

About Suzanne Scanlon:
Suzanne Scanlon is the author of the novels Promising Young Women and Her 37th Year, An Index. Her writing has appeared in Granta, BOMB Magazine, Fence, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other places. For many years, she wrote about theater for Time Out and the Chicago Reader. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern and the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Committed is her first work of nonfiction.
About Danielle Dutton:
Danielle Dutton is the author of , , , and , a collection forthcoming from Coffee House Press in April 2024. She also wrote the text interpolations in Richard Kraft’s and an illustrated nonfiction chapbook on fiction/visual art called . Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Harper’s, BOMB, NOON, etc. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is the co-founder and editor of Dorothy, a publishing project.
About the event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Suzanne and Danielle will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online after the event.

Event Venue

Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States