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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
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http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hot …

HOTEL - OBJECT LESSONS

Joanna Walsh

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.

Joanna Walsh has written for Granta, the London Review of Books, n+1, The White Review, The Guardian, Narrative Magazine, The European Short Story Network, Tate, and others. She is the author of collection of short stories, Fractals, and a visual diary of London, London Walks!, now on its third printing. Her writing has been selected for Best British Short Stories (2014, Salt Publishing).
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Published 2015-11-01 by Bloomsbury Academic

Comments

A slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desire. ... Walsh invokes everyone from Freud to Forster to Mae West to the Marx Brothers. She's funny throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish place. - The Paris Review

Evocative ... Walsh's strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution. - Publishers Weekly

Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery ... Hotel is a boldly intellectual work that repays careful reading. Its semiotic wordplay, circling prose and experimental form may prove a refined taste, but in its deft delineation of a complex modern phenomenon — and, perhaps, a modern malaise — it's a great success. - Financial Times

“The joy of the series, of reading Remote Control, Golf Ball, Driver's License, Drone, Silence, Glass, Phone Booth, Refrigerator, Hotel, and Waste (10 more titles are listed as forthcoming) in quick succession, lies in encountering the various turns through which each of their authors has been put by his or her object. As for Benjamin, so for the authors of the series, the object predominates, sits squarely center stage, directs the action. The object decides the genre, the chronology, and the limits of the study. Accordingly, the author has to take her cue from the thing she chose or that chose her. The result is a wonderfully uneven series of books, each one a thing unto itself.” – Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books Read more...

“Hotels,” Walsh says, “are for those who understand performance: ghosts, actors, women.” Read more...

Excerpt Read more...

"Read together, Joanna Walsh's “Hotel,” which her publisher describes as “part memoir and part meditation,” and her new collection of short stories, “Vertigo,” provide unexpected counterpoints to each other regarding issues of artistry, authenticity and vulnerability. They also raise additional questions about the newly popular — especially in nonfiction — fragmentary style." - Heidi Julavits Read more...