The Swank Hotel
Lucy Corin
(Author)
Description
A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdown
At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing--again. Em's days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a "responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage") and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible, happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin's idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny. The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad's eccentric parents, who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself. The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first-century America.Product Details
Price
$17.00
$15.81
Publisher
Graywolf Press
Publish Date
October 05, 2021
Pages
400
Dimensions
5.51 X 8.19 X 0.94 inches | 1.05 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781644450666
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About the Author
Lucy Corin is the author, most recently, of One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. She lives in Berkeley, California.