"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
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 Spiottas genius is to recognize that Niks 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...whats 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 theyre really unsettling.
-- Ron Charles, Washington Post
Outstanding...Male American writers have talked about the incursion of the real into territory previously held by the novelists capacity for invention; but who before Spiotta has written about realitys threat not to imagination but to memory itself?...An essential American writer.
-- Jonathan Dee, Harpers Magazine
Transfixing...Its 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 Spiottas 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
"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 losers game of conceit, deceit, passion, love and the raw mystery of superstar desire."
-- Thurston Moore
"Stone Arabia possesses the edged beauty and charged prose of Dana Spiottas 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
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 Xs Los Angeles or the Avengers Car Crash.
-- Greil Marcus, The Believer
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
Spiottas book is a triumph of structure... The skill with which Spiotta builds her characters and their offbeat, nuanced relationship makes it easy to feel like the kind of panting fan Nik could only have written about.
-- NPR.org
Extraordinary
. Diamond-honed prose.... Spiotta delivers one of the most moving and original portraits of a sibling relationship in recent fiction.
-- Publishers Weekly, starred review
Stunning . . . possesses the staccato ferocity of Joan Didion and the historical resonance and razzle-dazzle language of Don DeLillo.
-- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Stone Arabia is propelled by Spiottas unflashy eloquence, dry wit and depth of feeling. Shes an exceptional novelist, as sharp on socio-political history as she is on romance and family and especially, the spaces where such things overlap.
-- Minneapolis Star Tribune
A splendid concept...brisk...a testament to Spiottas intelligent style.
-- Buffalo News
Masterful...Spiottas intelligence and curiosity animate every page.
-- Portland Oregonian
Spiottas slim, intense novel is an insightful meditation on the damage wrought by a fame-obsessed culture, an unflinching look at family bonds that can turn to shackles and a virtuoso literary performance.
-- St. Petersburg Times
Spiottas slim, intense novel is an insightful meditation on the damage wrought by a fame-obsessed culture, an unflinching look at family bonds that can turn to shackles and a virtuoso literary performance.
-- St. Petersburg Times
[Dana Spiotta has] 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.
-- Houston Chronicle