Stone Arabia
Dana Spiotta
Available as Hardback
‘Transfixing … it’s as though Nabokov had written a rock novel’ Entertainment Weekly
Growing up wild in the 1970s, Nik was always the artist, always in a band. His beloved sister Denise was his most passionate fan. But now Denise watches as Nik retreats into a strange and private world of his own creation, leaving her to navigate the real world on her own.
When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film of Nik’s life and work, and tragedy strikes very close to home, Denise must try to make sense of what it means to be a sister, a daughter and a mother.
Evocative, honest and fiercely original, Stone Arabia is about how we become the adults we are. It’s a story of family, obsession, memory and the urge to create, no matter what.
“Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia is a dreamlike meditation on fame and success, technology and the imagination. The novel beautifully manifests Ms. Spiotta’s gift for transforming her keen cultural intelligence into haunting, evocative prose”
Jennifer Egan, Author Of The Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From The Goon Squad
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”Stone Arabia possesses the edged beauty and charged prose of Dana Spiotta’s earlier work, but in this novel about siblings, music, teen desire and adult decay, Spiotta reaches ever deeper, tracking her characters’ sweet, dangerous American dreaming with glorious precision. Here is a wonderful novel by one of our major writers”
Sam Lipsyte, Author Of The Ask
“I fell right into Stone Arabia. From the first page I was won over by Spiotta’s intelligence, charm and empathy. I loved it”
patrick Dewitt, Author Of The Man Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers
“Evocative, mysterious, incongruously poetic … [A] gritty, intelligent, mordent, and deeply sad novel. Spiotta has created, in Stone Arabia, a work of visceral honesty and real beauty”
Kate Christensen
new York Times Book Review
“Added to the brilliant glitter of Ms. Spiotta’s earlier work - so reminiscent, at times, of early Don DeLillo and early Joan Didion - is something deeper and sadder: not just alienation, but a hard-won awareness of mortality and passing time … A clever meditation on the feedback loop between life and art, and a moving portrait of a brother and sister”
Michiko Kakutani
new York Times
Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiotta is the author of Eat the Document, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Her first novel, Lightning Field, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the West. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and both the Rome Prize and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Spiotta teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse University and lives in New York with her husband and daughter.