Hotel Audiobook By Joanna Walsh cover art

Hotel
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Hotel

By: Joanna Walsh
Narrated by: Stephanie Racine
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About this listen

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.

©2015 Joanna Walsh (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Critic reviews

[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)
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. (Laura Waddell)
…For all the apparent personal revelations, the bond we form with [Walsh’s] persona remains profoundly casual, bound only by the time and space delimited by the number of hours, days, and nights we spend with her Hotel. The book takes the form of a series of snatched conversations in and around hotels with characters fictionalized from Freud, the Marx Brothers, and the cast of Grand Hotel (1932). Walsh disappears or retreats into this series of disconnected texts, postcards, and overheard conversations. Ultimately the lesson resides in this combination of intimacy and distance, of narrative lack and narrative fantasy, as constituted by the hotel, an object, symbolized best by the revolving door of Grand Hotel. ‘Grand Hotel ... always the same,’ opines Dr. Otternschlag. ‘People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.’ (Julian Yates)
Part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons - a series of books about the hidden lives of ordinary things - Hotel by Joanna Walsh defies genre categories, much like Walsh herself. ... Just as Hotel 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. Hotel is a clever little book that packs a punch, and Walsh is a writer whose sparse prose and contained voice endlessly surprises. (Sian Norris)
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)
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