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by Dana Spiotta
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 Spiotta's 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.
"Starred Review. A superb, spiky exploration of artistic motivation." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. National Book Award finalist Spiotta (Stone Arabia, 2011) brings to new levels of feverish intensity her signature dissection of obsession, the trends and ironies of the zeitgeist, how we document our lives, and the consequences of resistance to social imperatives in this ensnaring, sly, and fiercely intelligent novel, from which readers can extract a cineaste's dream watch list." - Booklist
"True to form, the effect is like watching raw footage before it's been edited - sometimes moving, often disjointed, always thought provoking." - Publishers Weekly
"Spiotta does a masterly job of getting under the skin of disparate characters, revealing the kinds of insecurities that plague us all, successful or not." - Library Journal
"What a thrilling ride. And what a delight to be at the receiving end of so much virtuosic caring. A daring and beautiful meditation about selfishness and selflessness, and how to be in the world."- George Saunders, author of Tenth of December
"Dana Spiotta is one of my favorite living writers and in this 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
"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
"This is such a fine novel ... What unfolds is simply flawless and epic." - Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
This information about Innocents and Others was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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