Media Reviews
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
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's stunning, virtuoso novel Stone Arabia plays out the A and B sides of a sibling bond between a brother - now a reclusive middle-aged musician who, seeing his shot at rock superstardom burn out, obsesses over his scrap-books, a fantasy version of his career - and his idolizing younger sister and enabler, now a mom, who strives for family harmony * * Vanity Fair * *
Like Jennifer Egan, Dana Spiotta records the smothered dreams of a washed-up musician, but what she's really listening for is the melody of nostalgia that none of us can resist . . . 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. She's captured that hankering for something alluring in the past that never was - a moment of desire and pretense that the best pop music articulates for each generation and makes everything else that comes later sound flat and disappointing * * Washington Post * *
Stone Arabia is a rock n' roll novel like no other. Where desire for legacy tangles with fantasy. And identity and memory are in and out of control. A loser's game of conceit, deceit, passion, love and the raw mystery of superstar desire -- Thurston Moore (singer/guitarist for Sonic Youth)
With a DeLillo-like ability to pinpoint the delusions of an era, the National Book Award-nominated Spiotta explores the inner workings of celebrity, family, and other modern-day mythologies * * Vogue * *
The book maps a post-punk milieu where the sense of completeness punk offered... never goes away. Spiotta can capture whole lives in the most ordinary transaction, and make it cut like X's 'Los Angeles' or the Avengers' 'Car Crash' -- Greil Marcus
Transfixing . . . it's as though Nabokov had written a rock novel * * Entertainment Weekly * *
Fascinating . . . agitating in the way it embodies the distractibility of contemporary life, but it is also trenchant and thought-provoking * * Wall Street Journal * *
Spiotta's extraordinary new novel is an inspired consideration of sibling devotion, Southern California, and fame . . . With her novel's clever structure, jaundiced affection for Los Angeles, and diamond-honed prose, Spiotta delivers one of the most moving and original portraits of a sibling relationship in recent fiction * * Publishers' Weekly, Starred Review * *
Stone Arabia is a truly contemporary novel. Do our stories bring us closer to ourselves, or do they simply hide and splinter our real identity? Stone Arabia assembles an impressive collage of questions about aging, identity, art and its audience, fame and its construction, privacy, knowing and being known, and how we define who we are . . . Spiotta is a writer of keen observation and careful craftsmanship . . . Ultimately, the interruptions of many forms of media - precisely the kinds of interruptions most novels insulate their readers from - give the book a jagged immediacy that raises more questions than it's capable of answering. * * The Millions * *
On the surface, this novel - which revolves around a middle-aged wannabe rocker and his fantasies of stardom - appears to be about the lies we tell ourselves. Its genius, though, resides in the way Spiotta turns that idea around on us, revealing her protagonist's dreams as more authentic than his daily existence, highlighting the at-times unbridgeable gap between imagination and reality. * * LA Times Books of the Year * *
Perfectly pitched, seemingly effortless meditation on celebrity and loss -- James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist * * The Australian Books of the Year * *
Feel what you will about this brother and sister in disrepair, but their passions are real, and in the end, Stone Arabia is a superb story of American siblings besieged by ghouls, by the false promises of rock and light * * Salon * *
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 * * Harper's Magazine * *
A dazzingly clever and deftly subtle dissection of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the grail of the authentic * * Dazed & Confused * *
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