Innocents and Others: A Novel - Couverture rigide

"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)

“A thrillingly complex and emotionally astute novel about fame, power, and alienation steeped in a dark eroticism and a particularly American kind of loneliness.” (Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair)

“[A] raw retrospective following the friendship of two filmmakers over years, miles, and frames.” (Cosmopolitan)

“The visionary liberty and daring with which Dana Spiotta has crafted her brilliant new novel INNOCENTS AND OTHERS is both inspirational and infectious. At its heart is a cinematic tale of friendship, obsession, morality, and creativity between best-friend filmmakers Carrie Wexler and Meadow Mori...original and seductive...with INNOCENTS AND OTHERS, [Spiotta] delivers a tale about female friendship, the limits of love and work, and costs of claiming your right to celebrate your triumphs and own your mistakes.” (Lisa Shea, Elle)

“Impossible to put down.” (Steph Optiz, Marie Claire)

“Dana Spiotta’s whip-smart INNOCENTS AND OTHERS maps the unexpected confluence of two rising feminist filmmakers and a movie buff who, posing as a film student, seduces Hollywood men over the phone, simply by listening to them.” (Marnie Hanel, W)

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.