Stone Arabia
10 best books like Stone Arabia (Dana Spiotta): Death Is Not an Option, My New American Life, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, The Tragedy of Arthur, Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories, Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, Someday This Will Be Funny, The Inverted Forest, Damascus, The London Train
| Author | Suzanne Rivecca |
| ISBN | 0393072568 |
Death Is Not an Option is a bold, dazzling debut collection about girls and women in a world where sexuality and self-delusion collide. In these stories, a teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating high school finds a warped kind of redemption...
| Author | Francine Prose |
| ISBN | 0061713767 |
Francine Prose captures contemporary America at its most hilarious and dreadful in My New American Life, a darkly humorous novel of mismatched aspirations, Albanian gangsters, and the ever-elusive American dream. Following her New York Times bestselling novels BlueAngel and A Changed Man, Prose...
| Author | Charles Baxter |
| ISBN | 0307379213 |
Ever since the publication of The Harmony of the World in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America’s finest short-story writers. Each subsequent collection—Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, and Believers—was further confirmation of his mastery: his...
| Author | Arthur Phillips |
| ISBN | 1400066476 |
The Tragedy of Arthur is an emotional and elaborately constructed tour de force from bestselling and critically acclaimed novelist Arthur Phillips, “one of the best writers in America” (The Washington Post).
Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young man struggling with a larger-than-life...
| Author | Barry Hannah |
| ISBN | 0802119689 |
Once again, foiled by the inaccuracy and wholesale brutality of a five-tiered rating system. Barry Hannah, based on this collection, got slightly worse - or at least less concerned about the vagaries of plot and the finely tuned sentence - but the first two collections are simply astounding. If I weren't...
Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
| Author | William Kennedy |
| ISBN | 0670022977 |
Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed, a dramatic novel of love and revolution from one of America's finest writers.
When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba,...
| Author | Lynne Tillman |
| ISBN | 1935869000 |
The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at...
Late on a warm summer night in rural Missouri, an elderly camp director hears a squeal of joyous female laughter and goes to investigate. At the camp swimming pool he comes upon a bewildering scene: his counselors stripped naked and engaged in a provocative celebration. The first camp session is set...
| Author | Joshua Mohr |
| ISBN | 0982684894 |
"Damascus succeeds in conveying a big-hearted vision." —The Wall Street Journal
"At once gripping, lucid and fierce, Damascus is the mature effort of an artist devoted to personal growth and as such contains the glints of real gold." -San Francisco Chronicle
It's...
| Author | Tessa Hadley |
| ISBN | 0062011839 |
Two lives, stretched between two cities, converge in a chance meeting with immediate and far-reaching consequences in this compelling, sophisticated tale from acclaimed New Yorker writer Tessa Hadley, author of Accidents in the Home and The Master Bedroom. As father struggles to reestablish a...
| Author | Lydia Millet |
| ISBN | 0393343456 |
Ghost Lights stars an IRS bureaucrat named Hal—a man baffled by his wife’s obsession with her young employer, T., and haunted by the accident that paralyzed his daughter, Casey. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find T.—the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s much-lauded...
| Author | Francisco Goldman |
| ISBN | 0802119816 |
In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing. Francisco, blamed for Aura’s death by her family...
| Author | Ismet Prcic |
| ISBN | 0802170811 |
Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and propulsively energetic debut is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California.
He is advised that in order to make peace with the...
| Author | Peter Stamm |
| ISBN | 1590513940 |
Alex has spent the majority of his adult life between two very different women--and he can't make up his mind. Sonia, his wife and business partner, is everything a man would want. Intelligent, gorgeous, charming, and ambitious, she worked tirelessly alongside him to open their architecture firm...
| Author | Terese Svoboda |
| ISBN | 0803226829 |
Young Harriet’s father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian—and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet’s story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange...
Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark
| Author | Brian Kellow |
| ISBN | 0670023124 |
The first biography of The New Yorker's influential, powerful, and controversial film critic.
A decade after her death, Pauline Kael remains the most important figure in film criticism today, in part due to her own inimitable style and power within the film community and in part due to the...
| Author | Steve Erickson |
| ISBN | 1609450639 |
One November night in a canyon outside L.A., Zan Nordhoc-a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ-sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country's first black president. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening...
| Author | Thomas Pletzinger |
| ISBN | 0393337251 |
Journalist Daniel Mandelkern leaves Hamburg on assignment to interview Dirk Svensson, a reclusive children's book author who lives alone on the Italian side of Lake Lugano with his three-legged dog. Mandelkern has been quarreling with his wife (who is also his editor); he suspects she has other reasons...
| Author | Richard Bausch |
| ISBN | 0307266273 |
From the prizewinning novelist and world-renowned short-story writer, the author of 2008’s universally acclaimed novel Peace (“A brilliant one-act drama depicting the futility and moral complexity of combat” —The New York Times), eleven indelible new tales that showcase the electrifying...
| Author | Marisa Silver |
| ISBN | 1416590293 |
Eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself.
Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as “a...
| Author | Joshua Cody |
| ISBN | 0393081060 |
Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. Facing a bone-marrow transplant and full radiation, he charts his struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, and the ruthless grasping for life and sensation; the encounter...
| Author | Alex Shakar |
| ISBN | 1569479755 |
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. A Washington Post notable book of the year, a New York Times editor's choice, named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, the Austin Chronicle, and the Kansas City Star.
Fred Brounian and his twin brother, George,...
| Author | Jessica Anya Blau |
| ISBN | 0061452025 |
Fourteen-year-old Jamie will never forget the summer of 1976. It's the summer when she has her first boyfriend, cute surfer Flip Jenkins; it's the summer when her two best friends get serious about sex, cigarettes, and tanning; it's the summer when her parents throw, yes, naked swim parties, leaving...
Pat Grant’s Blue sees an Aussie man reminiscing on his adolescence – before THEY came. The aliens (a stand-in for immigrants) who took over the white population and brought their own culture with them – how this Aussie oik hates multi-culturalism and racial diversity! He also recounts the time...
Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between
| Author | Jeff Sharlet |
| ISBN | 0393079635 |
No one explores the borderlands of belief and skepticism quite like Jeff Sharlet. He is ingenious, farsighted, and able to excavate the worlds of others, even the flakiest and most fanatical, with uncanny sympathy. Here, he reports back from the far reaches of belief, whether in the clear mountain...
