Lightning Field [Paperback]

Dana Spiotta (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER @ TRADE (1995)
• ASIN: B000SHA0G4
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Dana Spiotta is the author of EAT THE DOCUMENT, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Her first novel, LIGHTNING FIELD, was an LA Times Best Book of the West and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Spiotta received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007 and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in 2008. The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome awarded her the 2008 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize.

Her third novel, STONE ARABIA, will be published by Scribner in July.

More information can be found at danaspiotta.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars quote of the year: "Bang and banish", August 30, 2001

By 

ghosthornet (nyc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lightning Field: A Novel (Hardcover)

Lightning Field is as nuanced and sublime a portrait of life and lifers in contemporary LA as can be found. It is alternately grim and hilarious, as the three protagonists, almost artifacts themselves, stray through the land of artificial. Throughout, old hollywood ghosts and archaic american slang (Eureka, for example) punctuate what is really a document of today. Other old things invested with new life or cast in bright new light: 60's hippie/drug culture-- the "new age," and the library of black and white and technicolor tombs that innundate Mina, our central charater, and her brain.

The characters are not innoculated against the late capitalist infrastructure that surrounds them, and either are we. The evidence for this is in the author's immense talents at rendering comedy from the blight of shopping and the ugliness of a cool chain of concept restaurants that seem dreadful and unreal. Wool stockings and make-up never sounded so fascinating.
The novel assails our current dilema with brilliant turns of wit--the author manages to nail the protagonists and the reader with the sharpest of bullets.

The title refers, tragically and with echoes of the Catcher in the Rye, to the unattainable-- in fact it refers to the unnameable even.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Electricity of Lightning Captured, November 11, 2001

By 

brad webb (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lightning Field: A Novel (Hardcover)

Every once in a while I read a book that leaves me changed. Lightning Field is one of those rare books that is so disturbingly refreshing I cannot help but be affected by it. Spiota's style is wonderfully indescribable. While most first time authors weave a story of stolen stylistic interpretations, Spiota's style is all her own. The haunting ending might leave some literary fuddy-duddies asking "Why?" But those of you that are tired of reading the same "written formula" in book after uninventive book will breath a sigh of relief. This book is ground breaking and will leave you thinking...for a long time.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic debut novel, August 29, 2001

By 

John McCaffrey (Ballycastle, Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lightning Field: A Novel (Hardcover)

I found 'The Lightning Field' to be delightful. Dana Spiotta has truly burst onto the literary stage with all the wit of an Updike or Armistead Maupin, the pace and intricacy of a Robert Altman screenplay and the subtlety and nuance of Gore Vidal. In short, fantastic, witty, insightful on the many facets of our complex urban lives and loves, and a real stonker of a read. Please please tell us you're working on a sequel, Dana Spiotta!