“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.”