Dana Spiotta

In Eat the Document (2006; recently translated into French by Élodie Leplat), the novelist and Guggenheim Fellow Dana Spiotta tells the story of Mary Whittaker, a militant anti-Vietnam activist forced to change her identity. In this symphonic romance of a bygone America that traces the movement from the fervent idealism of the ’60s to the cynicism of the ’90s, Spiotta paints a subtle and powerful picture of the decline of the radical tradition.