Stone Arabia
- Author Dana Spiotta
- Narrator Elisabeth Rodgers
- Publisher Blackstone Publishing
- Run Time 7 hours and 3 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Family life fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Interior life.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- $13.95
- $12.95
- $11.95
- $10.95
- $9.95
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
New York Times
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
Entertainment Weekly
a rock novel.” -
“Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia is a dreamlike meditation on fame and success,
Jennifer Egan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad
technology and the imagination. The novel beautifully manifests Ms. Spiotta’s
gift for transforming her keen cultural intelligence into haunting, evocative
prose.” -
“Evocative,
New York Times Book Review
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
Harper's
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
Vanity Fair
Spiotta’s stunning, virtuoso novel Stone
Arabia plays out the A and B sides of a sibling bond.”
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