Synopses & Reviews
The most ambitious, accomplished, and beguiling novel yet from the author of the National Book Award finalist
Eat the Document and the National Books Critics Circle Award finalist
Stone Arabia.
Innocents and Others is a riveting story about three women looking for meaning in friendship, work, and love—“Dana Spiotta is a major unnervingly intelligent writer” (Joy Williams, author of
The Quick and the Dead).
They’ve always been friends, and they both become filmmakers: Meadow, who makes documentaries, and Carrie, who makes popular movies with a feminist slant. They grew up together in LA, sharing an obsessive love of film. Their friendship is complicated, but their devotion to each other trumps their wildly different approaches to work and to being in the world. Their lives collide with Jelly, a woman whose most meaningful encounters happen on the phone. Jelly cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening.
All the women grapple with the consequences of their actions and with the question of how to be good: a good artist, a good lover, a good friend, a good mother. They all fall short, but as they struggle toward an acceptance of their limits, they approach a kind of release.
A startlingly acute observer of the way we live now, Spiotta is a “wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today” (The New York Times). She is masterful at evoking the complexity of identity, the corrosive nature of technology, the tyranny of the body, and the enduring longing for connection. Innocents and Others is an ambitious and unforgettable new novel, “a literary marvel…her aim is nothing less than redemption, and she delivers” (Mary Karr, author Lit and The Liars’ Club).
Review
“Dana Spiotta's new book is a literary marvel that employs the dominant medium of our time to rout out both the impulse to make worlds alternate to the one we occupy and the darkest spots in the human heart. As Don DeLillo did for rock and roll with Great Jones Street, so Spiotta does for film with Innocents and Others. Spiotta is emerging as perhaps the major contender for fiction's next generation. Her aim is nothing less than redemption, and she delivers.” Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club and Lit
Review
“Dana Spiotta is one of my favorite living writers and inthis wondrous and mysterious novel, a spectacular and subtle meditation onsight and sound, she seems almost to channel Jean-Luc Godard: Innocents and Others, like classic JLG,is brilliant, and erotic, and pop.” Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba
Review
“Is there a more electrifying novelist working than Dana Spiotta?” David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
Review
“A major, unnervingly intelligent writer.” Joy Williams, author of The Quick and the Dead
Review
“A wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today...Identity — and the very American belief that individuals can invent or reinvent themselves anew here —is the bright thread that runs through the work of the immensely talented novelist Dana Spiotta.” Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
“Superb and original…Spiotta isa remarkable stylist.” Jane Ciabattari, The Boston Globe
Synopsis
From “a major, unnervingly intelligent writer” (Joy Williams)…“rich, funny, learned, and tonally fresh” (Jeffrey Eugenides), comes a novel about aspiration, film, work, and love.
Dana Spiottas new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the 80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common—except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone. Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.
Spiotta is “a wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today” (The New York Times). Innocents and Others is her greatest novel—wise, artful, and beautiful.
About the Author
Dana Spiotta is the author of Stone Arabia, A National Books Critics Circle Award finalist, and Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award. Spiotta is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize for Literature. She lives in Syracuse, New York.