Innocents and Others

"The most ambitious, accomplished, and beguiling novel yet from the author of the National Book Award finalist Eat the Document and the National Books Critics Circle Award finalist Stone Arabia. Innocents and Others is a riveting story about three women looking for meaning in friendship, work, and love--"Dana Spiotta is a major unnervingly intelligent writer" (Joy Williams, author of The Quick and the Dead). They've always been friends, and they both become filmmakers: Meadow, who makes documentaries, and Carrie, who makes popular movies with a feminist slant. They grew up together in LA, sharing an obsessive love of film. Their friendship is complicated, but their devotion to each other trumps their wildly different approaches to work and to being in the world. Their lives collide with Jelly, a woman whose most meaningful encounters happen on the phone. Jelly cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. All the women grapple with the consequences of their actions and with the question of how to be good: a good artist, a good lover, a good friend, a good mother. They all fall short, but as they struggle toward an acceptance of their limits, they approach a kind of release. A startlingly acute observer of the way we live now, 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). She is masterful at evoking the complexity of identity, the corrosive nature of technology, the tyranny of the body, and the enduring longing for connection. Innocents and Others is an ambitious and unforgettable new novel, "a literary marvel...her aim is nothing less than redemption, and she delivers" (Mary Karr, author Lit and The Liars' Club)"--