Innocents and Others - Softcover

"A daring and beautiful meditation about selfishness and selflessness, and how to be in the world. A powerful book that will stay with me."--George Saunders, author of Tenth of December

"Wondrous and mysterious... Brilliant, and erotic, and pop."--Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba

"Spiotta is emerging as perhaps the major contender for fiction's next generation."--Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club and Lit

"Flawless and epic."--Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

"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."--Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

"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, and 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

"Brilliant...masterful...Spiotta reminds us that the cinema is where America fears and desires have long been projected, the small-town theater an abandoned temple of shared dreams. At the same time, she nails a devastating irony: The more reachable we are, the more screens infiltrate our lives, the less there is that genuinely connects us."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue

From Dana Spiotta, the author of Eat the Document and Stone Arabia, “A brilliant novel...about female friendship, the limits of love and work, and costs of claiming your right to celebrate your triumphs and own your mistakes” (Elle).

Innocents and Others is about two women 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 friendship is complicated, but their devotion to each other trumps their wildly different approaches to film and to life. Meadow was always the more idealistic and brainy of the two; Carrie was more pragmatic. Into their lives comes Jelly, a master of seduction who calls powerful men and seduces them not with sex, but by being a superior listener. All of these women grapple with the question of how to be good: a good lover, a good friend, a good mother, a good artist.

A startlingly acute observer of the way we live now, Dana Spiotta “has created a new kind of great American novel” (The New York Times Magazine). “Impossible to put down” (Marie Claire), Innocents and Others is “a sexy, painfully insightful, and strangely redemptive novel about the ways we misread one another—with an ending that comes at you like a truck around a blind curve and stays with you for much, much longer” (Esquire).