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Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta is the author of the novels Innocents and Others, which was published by Scribner in 2016; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction; Eat the Document (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Lightning Field (2001). Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter Agnes and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.

Genres: Literary Fiction

Novels

   Lightning Field (2001)
   Eat the Document (2006)
   Stone Arabia (2011)
   Innocents and Others (2016)
   Wayward (2021)

Dana Spiotta recommends

Memory Piece (2024)
Lisa Ko
"Dazzlingly inventive and knowing, Memory Piece is a bold and affecting novel about resistance, solidarity, and friendship."

Hard Girls (2024)
(Jane and Lila Pool, book 1)
J Robert Lennon
"Hard Girls is a rollicking read, an immersive, funny, consequential family story that is also a thriller. Lennon is a master of plot and suspense, but he's also wonderful at creating indelible characters, particularly the wild twins at the heart of this story. Hard Girls deftly evokes complex family dynamics: the tense innocence and precocity of adolescence as well as the poignant, hard reckoning of parenthood."

Last Acts (2024)
Alexander Sammartino
"Last Acts is an astonishingly strong debut, big hearted and hilarious. I swear every sentence in this novel is glorious. Sammartino writes like a millennial Don DeLillo... Rizzo is a singular and great American character: a tender-but-obtuse father, a confidence man with no confidence, a charismatic loser with a voice you can't help but love."

The Vegan (2023)
Andrew Lipstein
"Andrew Lipstein's hilarious, acid-tart, spot-on, and deeply unnerving novel The Vegan follows its privileged narrator as his inability to tolerate his own guilt and complicity deranges him. We can't turn away as he follows his impulse, both righteous and ridiculous, to burn it all down. Lipstein has written a precise, weird, and wildly propulsive take on modern American ethical and moral bankruptcy."

House of Cotton (2023)
Monica Brashears
"Monica Brashears is an immense talent, and her enchanting, strikingly original prose will astonish you. Magnolia is such a vivid, tender character: whip smart but deeply innocent, traumatized but also joyful and funny. Magnolia's complex voice is nothing short of miraculous. House of Cotton is a powerful, seductive, and subversive novel."

Exalted (2022)
Anna Dorn
"Anna Dorn writes vivid, striking prose that reinterprets pop culture, the particularities of Southern California, and the complex technology of our human brains."

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. (2022)
Lee Kravetz
"A vivid portrait of mid-century America, particularly located in the Seven-Sisters-matching-bag-and-shoes class of women who seem to have everything but find themselves suffocatingly unfulfilled nevertheless. By playing with the real and the invented, Lee Kravetz creates a juicy, propulsive tale of artistic jealousy, fame, and psychology."

Perpetual West (2022)
Mesha Maren
"Perpetual West is an ambitious novel rendered in striking, sensual prose. Maren creates a vivid, precise, and complex sense of place; she shows us how cultural and physical geography shape who we are, what we do, and how the world understands us."

A Calling for Charlie Barnes (2021)
Joshua Ferris
"Joshua Ferris is one of our best writers, and A Calling for Charlie Barnes is wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant. Ingeniously written, it had me up reading late into the night. A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities."

Afterparties (2021)
Anthony Veasna So
"Anthony Veasna So is a terrific writer. These wild, complex, and funny stories are brilliant in every way. They also speak in profound ways to this troubled American moment. One of the most exciting debuts of the past decade."

Intimacies (2021)
Katie Kitamura
"Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller. It expertly and concisely delves into the paradoxes of language--how language can obscure our own complicity, and how language can enable us to escape our own delusions. Katie Kitamura is a wonder; her work is striking, stylish, and fully realized."

The Stone Loves the World (2021)
Brian Hall
"Brian Hall is brilliant, and he has written a wonderful, brainy, soulful novel that reaches wide and deep. Its characters are particular and achingly human. The Stone Loves the World is capacious, full of ideas as well as real heart."

Objects of Desire (2021)
Clare Sestanovich
"These stories are wickedly perceptive - Sestanovich precisely measures the distance between how people think of themselves and how the world reads them. A mesmerizing, exquisite debut."

The Removed (2021)
Brandon Hobson
"There are many stories in The Removed, a mystical, deep, and compassionate novel that explores how the intimate lives of a family are shaped by powerful ancestral legacies. The traumas of the past, both personal and historical, are forever with us, but—and here is the miraculous heart of this novel—people can still abide, resist, and even recover. Every character in The Removed seems to contain an intricate, particular, fully realized world. A quietly dazzling and haunting achievement."

Milk Fed (2021)
Melissa Broder
"Melissa Broder goes there and goes there again. Milk Fed is a hilarious and painfully accurate excavation of the female self-gaze, an erotic romp, a hyper witty satire of certain corridors of contemporary American culture and an unstoppable, wickedly seductive read."

Bubblegum (2020)
Adam Levin
"Adam Levin’s brilliant, inventive, fully imagined alternative world gives us insight and clarity about the actual world we live in. We are implicated, warned, but what a hilarious ride. Bubblegum is a wild, ambitious, and original novel. Levin is a wonder."

Weather (2020)
Jenny Offill
"There is no doubt that Jenny Offill is the writer for this particular historical moment. Weather is a tour de force of her considerable and startling gifts: the compressed and gorgeous sentences, the astounding comic timing, the profound and wise surprises. The miracle of this novel is how it looks at our contradictions and conditions with such bracing honesty and yet gives us a tender hopefulness toward these fraught humans. Offill makes us feel implicated but also loved."

Trust Exercise (2019)
Susan Choi
"An ingenious, morally complex exploration of how our youthful entanglements, cruelties, and traumas shape the rest of our lives. Choi's writing is dazzling in its control and precision; this witty, sharp, unsettling novel grabs you and won't let you go."

Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019)
K Chess
"Famous Men Who Never Lived is a fascinating novel: complex, uncanny, powerful. K Chess adroitly enacts Joyce’s 'cracked looking glass' and gives us an off-kilter reflection that allows us to really see who we are. The wit, elaboration, and detail of her invention are spectacular."

The Feral Detective (2018)
Jonathan Lethem
"Wild, urgent, and very funny. As always, Lethem writes knowingly and brilliantly about weird, off-the-grid, wayward America. In his ever-more-electric prose, he illuminates both the barbarity and the beauty."

The Distance Home (2018)
Paula Saunders
"Extraordinary . . . Paula Saunders writes beautiful, evocative prose that engages you in every aspect of this world. The Distance Home is heart-breaking and full of compassion while also managing to be exacting, precise and truthful. It accomplishes what great fiction should: we get a glimpse of our own humanity."

Treeborne (2018)
Caleb Johnson
"Treeborne is a remarkable first novel: poetic, funny, and populated by particular, fully alive characters. Caleb Johnson has a wonderful ear for the rhythm and diction of Southern voices. He knows how to light on just the right detail of place, time and person. Watching how the intertwined interests of the land, of the past, and of a family play out makes the novel compelling from start to finish."

Come with Me (2018)
Helen Schulman
"With her hallmark wit, authority, and precisely observed details, Schulman shows us the complexity of mid-life trials amid constant and immersive technology: the regret, the longing, and the undeniable wonder. A compassionate, astute, and irresistibly compelling novel."

The Twelve-Mile Straight (2017)
Eleanor Henderson
"Eleanor Henderson's lyrical evocation of rural Georgia during the Depression is mesmerizing, disturbing, and wonderfully persuasive. The world is brutal even as the landscape is lush and seductive. A riveting, consequential story full of complex secrets and unexpected turns."

Shadowbahn (2017)
Steve Erickson
"Steve Erickson is one of America’s greatest living novelists. Wild, inventive and surprising, Shadowbahn combines the social novel, science-fiction novel, and family novel."

More recommendations

Anthologies containing stories by Dana Spiotta

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 (2016)
(Best American Nonrequired Reading)
edited by
Rachel Kushner

Awards

National Book Award for Fiction Best Book nominee (2006) : Eat the Document

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