Hotel Living : A Novel
Author(s): Ioannis Pappos
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction!
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction!
Recalling both the excess of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the drifting narrator of A Single Man, Ioannis Pappos’s debut novel is a portrait of privilege, aspiration, and international finance during the wayward course of the American economy between 9/11 and the 2008 Financial collapse, and is filled with surprisingly tender observations about identity, loneliness, and human connection.
“I’m homeless, but in First Class.”
Stathis Rakis abandoned his small Greek village for a more worldly life, first in San Francisco, where the Dot Com Bubble had already burst, and then in Paris, France, where he is pursuing an MBA at an elite business school. After falling helplessly in love with a liberal New England journalist with a good conscience, who comes to campus with some scores to settle, Stathis moves to the United States to begin as a consultant for a company called Command. He spends the very few hours of the day that aren’t consumed by work draining the minibar, battling insomnia, and binging on more than room service. Luxury is a given, happiness is not.
As the economy recovers and a new bubble expands in a post-9/11 world, Stathis drifts upward, baring witness to the criminal decadence that will become the 2008 financial crisis, as well as his new habits of indulgence—drugs, sex, and insider trading. In a world of insiders--from corporate suits to Hollywood celebutantes—Stathis remains the outsider: too foreign to be one of them, too cynical to turn back.
Review(s):
“Ioannis Pappos’s Hotel Living could be The Great Gatsby, reincarnated in a contemporary hell beyond even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination. It’s harrowing. It’s smart and sexy; it’s funny and tragic. It is, in short, a great and terrible beauty of a book.”
“If Trollope were alive today, and he wanted to write The Way We Live Now about New York’s élite consultants, he would have written Hotel Living. Really a terrific book.”
“Thrilling storytelling with universal appeal.”
“At once a cool-eyed satire and an unexpectedly heartfelt meditation on the meaning of home.”
“Pappos is a first-rate storyteller and keen observer of our current moment. The prose here shimmers and the narration drives hard like the hard living lives in these pages. It’s a smart book that also happens to be entertaining…. I can’t wait for his next book.”
“Sex, drugs and insider trading abound in Ioannis Pappos’ tale of one immigrant’s rise in the world of corporate finance. The lifestyles described tow the line between fascinating and sickening, allowing you to determine how harshly the characters deserve to be judged.”
“Welcome to the glitzy, high-octane world of . . . management consulting…. Plenty of storytelling verve to keep readers engaged.”
“Pappos delivers a fast-moving narrative set in the new model world of the international business culture, junior division…. The sexual and social mores of a wired world…are well and truly captured through sharp conversations and vivid vignettes.”
“Like a cross between The Wolf of Wall Street and Edith Wharton, Ioannis Pappos gets all the details right in this insider’s look at love and money in New York City in the post-millennial age. Pappos is such a good writer.”
“Ioannis Pappos may be the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the wired postmillennial age. Hotel Living is an unforgettable debut…about love, sex, class, greed, and the search for one’s humanity against the blinding light of the American Dream.”
ISBN: 9780062376367