Stone Arabia

Zusatztext Spiotta is an epic and big-hearted novelist! one of my very favorite living writers when I read her! I always fall in love again with America and American culture. She's written about the 1960s underground! and Los Angeles! and! in a recent New Yorker story! the cult of 1970s telephone hackers. Here she takes on the American obsession with fame! and manages to say something new about that and about American families. Spiotta is a prime example of the adage (which I might just now be making up) that to write a great novel requires a great heart. Informationen zum Autor Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others ; 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. Her most recent novel is Wayward . She lives in Syracuse, New York. Klappentext From a National Book Award nominee comes "a smart! subtle! moving story about the complicated business of knowing the people you love" "(Book Forum"). Denise remains her brother Nik's most passionate audience! but when her daughter decides to make a film about Nik! everyone's vulnerabilities escalate. Leseprobe She always said it started, or became apparent to her, when their father brought him a guitar for his tenth birthday. At least that was the family legend, repeated and burnished into a shared over-memory. But she did really think it was true: he changed in one identifiable moment. Up until that point, Nik's main occupations had been reading Mad magazine and making elaborate ink drawings of dogs and cats behaving like far-out hipsters. He had charactersMickey the shaggy mutt who smoked weed and rode motorcycles; Linda the sluttish afghan who wore her hair hanging over one eye; and Nik Kat, his little alter ego, a cool cat who played pranks and escaped many close calls. Nik Kat addressed the reader directly and gave little winky comments about not wanting you to turn the page. Denise appeared as Little Kit Kat, the wonder tot. She had a cape and followed all the orders Nik Kat gave her. Nik made a full book out of each episode. He would make three or four copies with carbon paper and then later make more at some expense at the print shop, but each of the covers was created by hand and unique: he drew the images in Magic Marker and then collaged in pieces of colored paper cut from magazines. Denise still had Nik's zines in a box somewhere. He gave one copy to her and Mom (they had to share), one to his girlfriend of the moment (Nik always had a girlfriend), one was put in a plastic sleeve and filed in his fledgling archives, and one went to their father, who lived in San Francisco. Nik would take his father's issue, sign it, and write a limited-edition number on it before taping it into an elaborate package cut from brown paper grocery bags. He would address it to Mr. Richard Kranis. (Always with the word Kronos written next to it in microscopic letters. This alluded to an earlier time when each person in Nik's life was assigned the name and identity of a god. Naturally his dad was Kronos, and even though Nik had long ago moved on from his childish myths-and-gods phase, their father forever retained his Kronos moniker in subtle subscript.) Nik would draw all over the package, making the wrapping paper an extension of the story inside. After he mailed it off to his father, he recorded the edition numbers and who possessed them in his master book. Even then he seemed to be annotating his own life for future reference. Self-curate or disappear, he would say when they were older and Denise began to mock him for his obsessive archiving. Denise didn't think their father ever responded to these packages, but maybe he did. She never asked Nik about it. Her father would send a couple of toys in the ma...

Spiotta is an epic and big-hearted novelist, one of my very favorite living writers – when I read her, I always fall in love again with America and American culture. She’s written about the 1960s underground, and Los Angeles, and, in a recent New Yorker story, the cult of 1970s telephone hackers. Here she takes on the American obsession with fame, and manages to say something new about that – and about American families. Spiotta is a prime example of the adage (which I might just now be making up) that to write a great novel requires a great heart.

Autorentext

Dana Spiotta

Klappentext

From a National Book Award nominee comes "a smart, subtle, moving story about the complicated business of knowing the people you love" "(Book Forum"). Denise remains her brother Nik's most passionate audience, but when her daughter decides to make a film about Nik, everyone's vulnerabilities escalate.

Zusammenfassung
From the National Book Award nominated author of Innocents and Others and Wayward, “a smart, subtle, moving story about the complicated business of knowing the people you love” (Book Forum).

In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For Denise 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; she is also the crucial support for Nik and for their aging mother, whose dementia seems to threaten her own memory. When Denise’s daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities escalate.

In Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta “explores the inner workings of celebrity, family, and other modern-day mythologies” (Vogue).

Leseprobe
She always said it started, or became apparent to her, when their father brought him a guitar for his tenth birthday. At least that was the family legend, repeated and burnished into a shared over-memory. But she did really think it was true: he changed in one identifiable moment. Up until that point, Nik’s main occupations had been reading Mad magazine and making elaborate ink drawings of dogs and cats behaving like far-out hipsters. He had characters—Mickey the shaggy mutt who smoked weed and rode motorcycles; Linda the sluttish afghan who wore her hair hanging over one eye; and Nik Kat, his little alter ego, a cool cat who played pranks and escaped many close calls. Nik Kat addressed the reader directly and gave little winky comments about not wanting you to turn the page. Denise appeared as Little Kit Kat, the wonder tot. She had a cape and followed all the orders Nik Kat gave her. Nik made a full book out of each episode. He would make three or four copies with carbon paper and then later make more at some expense at the print shop, but each of the covers was created by hand and unique: he drew the images in Magic Marker and then collaged in pieces of colored paper cut from magazines. Denise still had Nik’s zines in a box somewhere. He gave one copy to her and Mom (they had to share), one to his girlfriend of the moment (Nik always had a girlfriend), one was put in a plastic sleeve and filed in his fledgling archives, and one went to their father, who lived in San Francisco.

Nik would take his father’s issue, sign it, and write a limited-edition number on it before taping it into an elaborate package cut from brown paper grocery bags. He would address it to Mr. Richard Kranis. (Always with the word Kronos written next to it in microscopic letters. This alluded to an earlier time when each person in Nik’s life was assigned the name and identity of a god. Naturally his dad was Kronos, and even though Nik had long ago…