{"product_id":"9781628924732","title":"Hotel","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eHotel\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor(s): Joanna Walsh\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObject Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReview(s):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery ... \u003ci\u003eHotel \u003c\/i\u003eis 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.” –\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Evocative ... Walsh's strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It feels like something you want to endlessly quote: sharp, knowing, casually erudite...  there is power and an affecting gravitas in what Walsh does with detail. The actual operates in the book as lonely gesture, deprived of the clammy self-revelation that a lesser writer might emphasise in a desperate bid to hold the reader’s attention. Instead, we sift the fragments through other fragments: as sharp as her riffs on Freud and Heidegger are (and she’s calmly mocking and irreverent at times too, which helps) what a reader truly returns to is a more open, personal writing... It’s a formal victory, an accurate rendering of a scattered emotional state.\" -Adam Rivett, \u003ci\u003eSydney Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers.  \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e is a dazzling tour de force of embodied ideas.” —\u003ci\u003eDeborah Levy, author of Black Vodka\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” —\u003ci\u003eLisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” —\u003ci\u003eFlavorwire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery ... \u003ci\u003eHotel \u003c\/i\u003eis 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.” -\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Walsh's] sentences are like a series of rocks expertly skipped across a body of water that maintains surface tension, refusing to allow objects to sink in.\" -\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Walsh] is the author of a short book in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series called \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.\" -Darcie Dennigan, \u003ci\u003eThe Rumpus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Writer Joanna Walsh, after the collapse of her marriage, became a hotel reviewer. She recounts the experience of staying in and reviewing hotels in \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e, published by Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. … The hotel stands in for what should be, or simply what was, but is no longer. ‘A hotel sets itself apart from home and, in doing so, proves rather than denies home’s existence,’ Walsh writes. Ruminating on what went wrong in her marriage, she realizes at its center is the idea of what makes something — or someone — a home.” -Jessica Ferri,  \u003ci\u003eThe Barnes \u0026amp; Noble Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It's a knock out. Completely engaging, juicy and dry—such a great book.\" -Chris Kraus, author of \u003ci\u003eI Love Dick\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series about ‘the hidden lives of ordinary things’ (other books are about everything from dust to shipping containers and refrigerators)… is a clean, almost geometric work, the breakdown of the personal sphere encased in the sanitised environment of the hotel.…  Such descriptions may make Walsh’s work seem overly theoretical, which would belie the pleasures that can be found in virtually every sentence. One of the singular joys in Walsh’s prose is how she questions and twists language systems until familiar words and expressions become uncanny, portals to a stranger world...\" -Agri Ismaïl,\u003ci\u003e Minor Literature[s]\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons - a series of books about the hidden lives of ordinary things - \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e by Joanna Walsh defies genre categories, much like Walsh herself. [...] \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e is part memoir, part essay, part meditation and all fascinating. [...] Just as \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e defies genre in its moving between essay, meditation and memoir, its subtle and slippery content can’t be contained in a single review. Each reader will take something different from it, relate to a different experience or nod to a different allusion. \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e is a clever little book that packs a punch, and Walsh is a writer whose sparse prose and contained voice endlessly surprises.” –Sian Norris, \u003ci\u003eopenDemocracy 50.50 Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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. … \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e joins other intriguing, minimalist non-fiction titles such as \u003ci\u003eRemote Control\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSilence\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003ePhone Booth\u003c\/i\u003e. Part personal reflection, part semiotic and symbolic interrogation, \u003ci\u003eHotel\u003c\/i\u003e takes on a playful format. ... Alongside the intelligent analysis and playful structure, Joanna Walsh captures something innately surreal and peculiar about hotels.\" -Laura Waddell, \u003ci\u003eGlasgow Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you've read a few of these, you'll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: 'I wonder what the story is behind this thing?'\"—\u003ci\u003eSteven Johnson, best-selling author of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory legend Ian Bogost and cultural studies academic Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays and small, beautiful books about everyday objects from shipping containers to toast. \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e hosts a collection of \"mini object-lessons\", brief essays that take a deeper look at things we generally only glance upon ('Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be \"done?\" Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?'). More substantive is Bloomsbury's collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth.\" \u003ci\u003e—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Haunting and meditative: more about moods than about facts.” –\u003ci\u003eBook Riot\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eISBN:  9781628924732\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ","brand":"Bloomsbury Academic","offers":[{"title":"Paperback \/ softback","offer_id":40595796852942,"sku":"9781628924732","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0600\/7029\/7806\/products\/getimage_59a9c1f8-70cc-46a8-a5a9-323fb0f3460d.jpg?v=1637841250","url":"https:\/\/pickwickbookshop.com\/products\/9781628924732","provider":"Pickwick Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}