Innocents and Others - Hardcover

"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. A powerful book that will stay with me and continue to speak to me for a long time. Spiotta is a wonder."--George Saunders, author of Tenth of December

"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

"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

"This is such a fine novel. Stone Arabia, Spiotta's last book, was a complete thrill. With Innocents and Others she offers even deeper, more crushing insights into the life of the artist: the compromises, the blind will, the personal costs and moral despair. And the heartbreaking friendship at the center of it all! What unfolds is simply flawless and epic."--Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

"The brilliant Dana Spiotta had me from page one of Innocents and Others--a lithely intelligent, moving inquiry into the mysterious compositions of art and friendships."--Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

"Radiant, concentrated... a compassionate, unsparing book, full of provocative ideas about art, ethics and the formation of sensibility... simultaneously vast and local, exploring great American themes (self-invention, historical amnesia) within idiosyncratic worlds (phone phreaks, '80s Los Angeles adolescence). She has been compared with Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, but her tone and mood are distinctly her own: She's fascinated, not alienatedRadiant, concentrated... a compassionate, unsparing book, full of provocative ideas about art, ethics and the formation of sensibility... simultaneously vast and local, exploring great American themes (self-invention, historical amnesia) within idiosyncratic worlds (phone phreaks, '80s Los Angeles adolescence). She has been compared with Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, but her tone and mood are distinctly her own: She's fascinated, not alienated."--Susan Burton "The New York Times Magazine "

"Dana Spiotta's writing is a perfect mix of addictively weird characters, slightly skewed history and art within art...Innocents and Others will have you forgetting that the bath has grown cold as you read long into the night."--Lena Dunham "Lenny Letter "

"Innocents and Others is a confrontation with the blessings and curses of the body, the pleasures and costs of fantasy, the impossibility of either total truth or total fiction. It is a work of acute cultural intelligence and moral imagination, ... he more time you spend with it, the more slippery, original, and uncanny it reveals itself to be...there aren't five other living American authors as meticulous and shrewd as Dana Spiotta, as willing (to say nothing of able) to shape true esotericism into such consistently accessible forms..."--Justin Taylor "Bookforum "

"Remembering, and recording, the way the senses seep into each other is at the heart of Dana Spiotta's full-bodied new novel...glorious. The novel comes together like a movie, the chapters sitting alongside each other with beautiful symmetry, the chapter titles reading like scene cards."--Naomi Skwarna "The National Post "

"Innocents and Others...delivers in the most personal, least high tech way, comprising notes, lists, screenplay cuts, and reveries. She writes one of the most tender, but most explicit love scenes I've ever read. Along the way there are explorations of the meaning-- and pain--of devotion to our art or passions, the importance of our senses, how we account for ourselves, our impulses to keep secrets and to confess them.'--Patricia Zohn "The Huffington Post "

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.