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Sign up todayStone Arabia
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“If one of the core values of rock n roll is authenticity, is the truest rock star one who doesn't have an audience? This book probes that question through Nik Worth, a prolific recording artist and meticulous chronicler of an imaginary rock career that only his sister is fully aware of. A fascinating interrogation of art, audience, and family dynamics.”
— David • Avid Bookshop
Stone Arabia is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create—in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.
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 haunt Denise. When her daughter Ada decides to make a film about Nik, everyone's vulnerabilities seem to escalate.
Dana Spiotta is an author whose novel Stone Arabia was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Eat the Document was a National Book Award finalist and won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novel Lightning Field was a New York Times Notable Book of the year. She was a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. After graduating from Princeton University, she completed a two-year program at William Esper Studio, where she studied with Maggie Flanigan. Her audiobook narration training came from Robin Miles, who has also directed her in several productions. She has recorded dozens of books for a multitude of publishers.
Reviews
“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.”
“Transfixing…It’s as though Nabokov had written a rock novel.”
“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.”
“Evocative, mysterious, incongruously poetic...gritty, intelligent, mordent, and deeply sad...Spiotta has created, in Stone Arabia, a work of visceral honesty and real beauty.”
“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.”
“Dana Spiotta’s stunning, virtuoso novel Stone Arabia plays out the A and B sides of a sibling bond.”
“[Stone Arabia] explores the inner workings of celebrity, family, and other modern-day mythologies.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Superb and original…Dana Spiotta nails this cultural moment in America…She’s a remarkable stylist, with fine-honed sentences, risky structural choices, and kaleidoscopic points of view.”
“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.”
“Elisabeth Rodgers…performs with admirable attention and skill, smoothly distinguishing the characters’ sexes, ages, and emotional states.”
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