Dana Spiotta
Bestselling Novelist
National Book Award Finalist
"An essential American writer..." —Harper's
“[A] wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities...of contemporary life.” —New York Times
"Dana Spiotta is a major, unnervingly intelligent writer." —Joy Williams
Dana Spiotta is the author of three novels, Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011), Eat the Document (2006), and The Lightning Field (2001). Her first novel, The Lightning Field, was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the West. Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is about a woman forced to remake her identity after a botched political action.
Often compared to those of writers such as Joan Didion and Don DeLillo, Spiotta’s novels take a satiric and distinctly post-modern look at American life and culture, exploring “broad, endemic social ills in the small, peculiar lives of [her characters]” (Washington Post). They deal with themes as broad as terrorism, consumer culture, fame, history, creativity, and our obsession with the news media. Her novels seek to capture with meticulous detail the social contexts in which they’re set—Eat the Document jumps from the counterculture revolutions of the 1970s to the more demure, middle-class suburban lifestyle of the ‘90s, while Stone Arabia deals very specifically with 2004, a time of “Wikipedia…but not Youtube.”
Believer interview for Eat the Document
LA Times interview for Stone Arabia
NPR Interview about Stone Arabia
Dana Spiotta was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2007-2008, and of the New York Foundation of the Arts in 2008. She was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome in 2008. She teaches at Syracuse University. Her novels have been translated into French, German, Chinese, Italian, Dutch, and have been published in the U.K.
About STONE ARABIA (2011)
Dana Spiotta’s moving and intrepid third novel 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 haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities seem to escalate. Dana Spiotta has established herself as a “singularly powerful and provocative writer” (The Boston Globe) whose work is fiercely original. Stone Arabia—riveting, unnerving, and strangely beautiful—reexamines what it means to be an artist and redefines the ties that bind.
About EAT THE DOCUMENT (2006)
Dana Spiotta, whom Michiko Kakutani called "wonderfully observant and wonderfully gifted...with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadness of contemporary life" (The New York Times), has written a bold and moving novel about a fugitive radical from the 1970s who has lived in hiding for twenty-five years. Eat the Document is a hugely compelling story of activism, sacrifice, and the cost of living a secret. In the heyday of the 1970s underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker—passionate, idealistic, and in love—design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see each other again. Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother's generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Dana Spiotta deftly explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism. Character-driven and brilliant, Eat the Document is an important and revelatory novel about the culture of rebellion, with particular resonance now.
