Men in Miami Hotels : A Novel
Author(s): Charlie Smith
A Paperback Original
From Charlie Smith, critically acclaimed poet and author of Three Delays, comes the thrilling, moving, and violent story of Cotland Sims, a Miami gangster hellbent on helping his mother—when he steals a trove of emeralds to cover costs, he risks losing everyone he loves
Charlie Smith has been called a novelist of “appalling brilliance” on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review. Critics praise his work with the fervor of conversion. And he continues to write distinctive, compelling, and powerful prose that plumbs the experience of consciousness, the demands of the heart, and the mortal commitment that binds us all together.
In Men in Miami Hotels, a man named Cotland, a gangster from Miami, must come home to Key West because his mother’s house has fallen off its stilts. For a long time, maybe since always, he’s been estranged from his distant, combative mother, who is only now, in her old age, beginning to soften, starting to circle back to Cot, the son she had disowned. Motivated by the chance to help his mother (along with collateral financial gain), Cot decides to snatch a trove of emeralds that his boss back in Miami, the relentlessly vicious Albertson, kept hidden on a small island. And that’s when the trouble starts. Cot has 48 hours to return the emeralds before he and his family—his younger, slow-minded brother; his life-long, pseudo-girlfriend; his wise, wary mother—are all killed. But Cot is formidable. He makes some unlikely escapes and executes nearly every assassino come to kill him with one of three pistols he keeps handy. But the violence is not gruesome or gory. Rather this tropical, sun-dappled noir becomes a dark fight for survival, a struggle for existential sustenance. By the end, there are heart-breaking deaths, maddening betrayals, and enough shots fired to fill a pool with bullets.
Review(s):
“Smith’s prose is pitch perfect and fierce, and I’m always glad to find myself on a ride through his America, in the company of his Americans and the dark, absurd tumult of their passionate follies.”
“Charlie Smith’s terrific new novel…walks a line between genre and something considerably wilder, a fictional territory where a character might lose his or her soul…where narrative arises out of language, and scenes are important less for what happens in them than for how they are described.”
“In Smith’s masterfully lyrical prose, what could have been a simple pulpy adventure becomes a rewarding, and even challenging, examination of time, fate and fatalism that recalls the best work of Denis Johnson or Robert Stone.”
“[T]he perfect summer read, especially if you like your summer reads perfectly offbeat…Men in Miami Hotels reads like a suspenser by Elmore Leonard, if Leonard were having a fever dream….He writes like an angel, an angel...with a broken heart.”
“Smith writes some of the most elaborately beautiful sentences of any writer living today, and in Men in Miami Hotels, these sentences coil dreamily around the lush Floridian landscape, the loved women wrinkling before Cot’s eyes, the undignified final breaths breathed in sudden bloodbaths.”
“A mastery such as Smith’s is rare, and…the bounties furnished are great: pearls of understanding that circle some kind of holy instruction; the author’s gifts to us for better navigation in our own stories; and tools that we will access long after the precise arrangement of words has left us.”
“What’s better for your poolside reading than a good old literary gangster novel? That’s what you’ll get and more from the always excellent Charlie Smith, who manages to spin a violent tale with uncommon poeticism and knockout sentences.”
“Smith’s edgy prose is as arresting as Miami art deco, and the psychology at work here is as tangled and dark as a mangrove swamp….Smith turns a rogue gangster’s tale into a glimmering, sharply faceted, hauntingly philosophical tragedy of cosmic flaws, stunning betrayals, and bloody revenge.”
“Smith writes in a curious blend of registers that has the narrative drive of an airplane read and the mystical resonance of verse…The result is a haunting and starkly grim fantasia on love, mourning, and the alienation inflicted by time.”
“Charlie Smith fills language with so much life that his fictional worlds take on an uncanny substance. We can taste those mackerel fillets straight out of the old metal drum smoker, inhale the smell of starlight, and share the guilty exhilaration as Cot slips and slides his way toward survival.”
ISBN: 9780062247278