Hotel (Object Lessons) - Softcover

Joanna Walsh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 162892473X ISBN 13: 9781628924732

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

Synopsis

Hotel

About this title

Review

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\

[A] slyly humorous and clever little book ... [Walsh moves] effortlessly and imaginatively from one thing to the next ... with utter conviction in each step. I loved Hotel and would read it again.
-- Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

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

Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers. Hotel is a dazzling tour de force of embodied ideas.
- Deborah Levy, author of Black Vodka

Subtle and intriguing, this small book is an adventure in form. Part meditation on hotels, it mingles autobiography and reflections on home, secrets, and partings. Freud, Dora, Heidegger, and the Marx Brothers all have their moments on its small, intensely evocative stage.
--- Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion

Featured in The Literary Hub
- The Literary Hub

Walsh has been praised to the skies by Chris Kraus and Jeff Vandermeer, and it isn t hard to see why. Her writing sways between the tense and the absurd, as if it s hovering between this world and another. --Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire

Object Lessons is an essay and book series on the hidden lives of everyday things which takes quotidian objects as a starting point for analysis. ... Hotel joins other intriguing, minimalist non-fiction titles such as Remote Control, Silence, and Phone Booth. Part personal reflection, part semiotic and symbolic interrogation, Hotel takes on a playful format. ... Alongside the intelligent analysis and playful structure, Joanna Walsh captures something innately surreal and peculiar about hotels. --- Glasgow Review of Books

About the Author

Joanna Walsh is a writer based in England. Her work has been published by Granta, Dalkey (Best European Fiction 2015), Salt (Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015), Tate, and others. Her books include Fractals (2013), and Vertigo (The Dorothy Project, 2015). She reviews for The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The National (UAE). She is fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, and runs #readwomen, described by the New York Times as a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers. She is also an illustrator.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 162892473X
• ISBN 13: 9781628924732
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176