Stone Arabia - Softcover

"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

"Added to the brilliant glitter of Ms. Spiotta's earlier work...is something deeper and sadder: not just alienation, but a hard-won awareness of mortality and passing time... both a clever meditation on the feedback loop between life and art, and a moving portrait of a brother and sister, whose wild youth on the margins of the rock scene has given way to the disillusionments and vexations of middle age."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Is there a more electrifying novelist working than Dana Spiotta?...[Stone Arabia] makes for a sharp character study: A portrait of the artist as middle-aged never-was. Yet Spiotta's genius is to recognize that Nik's journey is representative not just for his sister or his mother but for every one of us."--David Ulin, LA Times

"I read Stone Arabia avidly and with awe. The language of it, the whole Gnostic hipness of it is absolutely riveting. It comes together in the most artful, surprising, insistent, satisfying way. Dana Spiotta is a major, unnervingly intelligent writer."--Joy Williams, author of The Quick and the Dead

"Fascinating...resonant...what's most remarkable about Stone Arabia is the way Spiotta explores such broad, endemic social ills in the small, peculiar lives of these sad siblings. Her reflections on the precarious nature of modern life are witty until they're really unsettling."--Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Outstanding...Male American writers have talked about the incursion of the real into territory previously held by the novelist's capacity for invention; but who before Spiotta has written about reality's threat not to imagination but to memory itself?...An essential American writer."--Jonathan Dee, Harper's Magazine

"Transfixing...It's as though Nabokov had written a rock novel."--Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

"Evocative, mysterious, incongruously poetic...gritty, intelligent, mordent, and deeply sad...Spiotta has created, in Stone Arabia, a work of visceral honesty and real beauty."--Kate Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

"Dana Spiotta's stunning, virtuoso novel Stone Arabia plays out the A and B sides of a sibling bond..."--Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

"A smart, subtle, moving story about the complicated business of knowing the people you love...a wild, sorrowful, rambling, deeply subjective, incandescently beautiful document."--Matthew Sharpe, Bookforum

From a National Book Award nominee, “a smart, subtle, moving story about the complicated business of knowing the people you love” (Book Forum).

In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For Denise and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience; she is also the crucial support for Nik and for their aging mother, whose dementia seems to threaten her own memory. When Denise’s daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities escalate.

In Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta “explores the inner workings of celebrity, family, and other modern-day mythologies” (Vogue).