Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta
Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta
List: $21.95 | Sale: $15.37
Club: $10.97

Stone Arabia

Author: Dana Spiotta

Narrator: Elisabeth Rodgers

Unabridged: 7 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/12/2011

Synopsis

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.

About Dana Spiotta

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.

About Elisabeth Rodgers

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

Goodreads review by Ian

CRITIQUE: The Worth of Worth Denise's brother is Nik Worth, a multi-instrumentalist and lead singer who is best known as the frontman of the late 70’s bands, the Fakes and the Demonics. His first name for a band that never eventuated was The Make-Believers. The Fakes were a Beatlesque power pop band wh......more

Goodreads review by Lou

You will find in this novel some swell writing, the story flows well and touches many issues of the modern era. The protagonist Denise rambles on life, the bubble around her brother Nik the music artist and her mother Ada who is slowly heading down the Dementia road. The story includes real news hea......more

Goodreads review by christa

In the winter of 2007 my boyfriend and I invented a game called "Let's just see where the day takes us." This would start with taking a bus downtown and end 18 hours later passed out in a stony booze coma, snoring out a toxic mix of carbon dioxide and alcohol fumes. A few days ago he found photograp......more

Quotes

“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.” New York Times

“Transfixing…It’s as though Nabokov had written a rock novel.” Entertainment Weekly

“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

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

“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

“Dana Spiotta’s stunning, virtuoso novel Stone Arabia plays out the A and B sides of a sibling bond.” Vanity Fair

“[Stone Arabia] explores the inner workings of celebrity, family, and other modern-day mythologies.” Vogue

“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.” Washington Post

“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.” Los Angeles Times

“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.” Boston Globe

Awards

  • Barnes & Noble Best Book
  • Washington Post Best Book
  • Los Angeles Times Best Book
  • Entertainment Weekly Best Book
  • Boston Globe Book of the Year
  • New York Times Notable Book
  • Newsweek Best Book
  • National Book Critics Circle Award
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Book
  • Salon Magazine Best Book
Add to Cart
Add to Wish List