Hotel

Object Lessons

De: Joanna Walsh

Narrado por: Stephanie Racine

Bloomsbury presents Hotel by Joanna Walsh, read by Stephanie Racine.

Object Lessons is a series of short 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.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.(P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Reseñas de la Crítica

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.

[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)

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.

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

Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers. Hotel is a dazzling tour de force of embodied ideas.

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.

Featured in The Literary Hub

[Walsh] is the author of a short book in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series called Hotel. With Heidegger, Freud, and Greta Garbo as touchpoints, the pieces use details from her job reviewing hotels and her unraveling marriage to meditate on desire, aphonia, immobility, and isolation. [T]he book is driven by an intense self-consciousness, but perhaps because it doesn’t need to make even a gesture toward fiction, there’s more linguistic play in here, more aphorisms you want to copy onto a postcard and send to your unhappiest smart friend.

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)

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.

Walsh brings together autobiographical experience and reflection ... [to] illuminate aspects of the experience of the hotel: from Freud to Groucho Marx, from Mae West to Heidegger.