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From National Book Award nominee Dana Spiotta, a startlingly original and compelling novel about an eccentric artist and his sister.
In the sibling relationship, "there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other," says Denise Kranis. For her 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, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family's first defense against the world's fragility. Friends die, their mother's memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone's vulnerabilities seem to escalate.
"Starred Review. Extraordinary…. Diamond-honed prose.... Spiotta delivers one of the most moving and original portraits of a sibling relationship in recent fiction." - Publishers Weekly,
"In this sharply perceptive, intricate, funny, and thought-provoking tale, Spiotta reckons with creativity, isolation, empathy, and the barrage of digitized information that breaches the borders of our psyches, threatening to annihilate our true selves." - Booklist
"This is cutting-edge literary fiction with plenty of rock references for music buffs." - Library Journal
"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 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
This information about Stone Arabia was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dana Spiotta is the author of Lightning Field, a New York Times Notable Book, and Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband and daughter. You can find her at www.danaspiotta.com.
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