Stone Arabia

This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.

Listen to a sample

What to expect

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.

Critics Review

  • “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

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.