A Hotel is a Funny Place

A Hotel is a Funny Place
Author: Shelley Berman
Publisher: Price Stern Sloan
Total Pages: 117
Release: 1985
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 9780843114188

Offers a humorous look at maids, hotel furniture, desk clerks, bellmen, switchboard operators, managers, room service, and the differences between good and bad hotels

All Over the Place

All Over the Place
Author: Geraldine DeRuiter
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1610397649

Some people are meant to travel the globe, to unwrap its secrets and share them with the world. And some people have no sense of direction, are terrified of pigeons, and get motion sickness from tying their shoes. These people are meant to stay home and eat nachos. Geraldine DeRuiter is the latter. But she won't let that stop her. Hilarious, irreverent, and heartfelt, All Over the Place chronicles the years Geraldine spent traveling the world after getting laid off from a job she loved. Those years taught her a great number of things, though the ability to read a map was not one of them. She has only a vague idea of where Russia is, but she now understands her Russian father better than ever before. She learned that what she thought was her mother's functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called "being Italian." She learned what it's like to travel the world with someone you already know and love -- how that person can help you make sense of things and make far-off places feel like home. She learned about unemployment and brain tumors, lost luggage and lost opportunities, and just getting lost in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. And she learned that sometimes you can find yourself exactly where you need to be -- even if you aren't quite sure where you are.

Strange Hotel

Strange Hotel
Author: Eimear McBride
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 077106215X

From the multi-award-winning author of the literary phenomenon A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, an exquisitely rendered and emotionally devastating meditation on love, loneliness, grief, and the possibilities for renewal. A nameless woman enters a non-descript hotel room she's been in once before, many years ago. Though the room hasn't changed, she has, as have the dimensions of her life. As she goes on to occupy a series of hotel rooms around the world -- each of which reflects back some aspect of herself -- we begin to piece together the details of what transpires in these rooms, the rules of engagements she's put in place for herself and the men she sometimes meets, and the outlines of the absence she is trying to forget. Gradually, we come to understand what it is the narrator seeks to contain within the anonymous rooms she is drawn to, and how she might become free. Told in a mesmerizing voice that will beguile readers with its fierceness, vulnerability, honesty, and black humour, Strange Hotel immerses us in the currents of attraction, love, and grief. It is an immensely moving and ultimately revelatory exploration of one woman's attempts to negotiate her own memories and impulses, and what it might mean to return home.

Hotel Life

Hotel Life
Author: Caroline Field Levander
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2015-04-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469621134

What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities. More than simply structures made of steel, concrete, and glass, hotels are social and political institutions that we invest with overlapping and contradictory meaning. These alluring places uniquely capture the realities of our world, where the lines between public and private, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred. Guiding readers through the story of hotels as places of troublesome possibility, as mazelike physical buildings, as inspirational touchstones for art and literature, and as unsettling, even disturbing, backdrops for the drama of everyday life, Levander and Guterl ensure that we will never think about this seemingly ordinary place in the same way again.

It's Kind of a Funny Story

It's Kind of a Funny Story
Author: Ned Vizzini
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2010-09-25
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1423141083

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy. At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away.

My Holiday in North Korea

My Holiday in North Korea
Author: Wendy E. Simmons
Publisher: Rosetta Books
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0795347227

“You remember Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun? Yeah, this really isn’t like those. It’s better” (San Francisco Chronicle). Most people want out of North Korea. Wendy Simmons wanted in. In My Holiday in North Korea: The Funniest/Worst Place on Earth, Wendy shares a glimpse of North Korea as it’s never been seen before. Even though it’s the scariest place on Earth, somehow Wendy forgot to check her sense of humor at the border. But Wendy’s initial amusement and bewilderment soon turned to frustration and growing paranoia. Before long, she learned the essential conundrum of “tourism” in North Korea: Travel is truly a love affair. But, just like love, it’s a two-way street. And North Korea deprives you of all this. They want you to fall in love with the singular vision of the country they’re willing to show you and nothing more. Through poignant, laugh-out-loud essays and ninety-two never-before-published color photographs of North Korea, Wendy chronicles one of the strangest vacations ever. Along the way, she bares all while undergoing an inner journey as convoluted as the country itself. “Much of the humor and poignancy comes from the absurdity of a fun-loving free spirit taking a vacation that’s more rigidly scripted and controlled than a presidential motorcade . . . Simmons’ photos—including an eerie image of a classroom full of schoolgirls playing accordions—further illustrate the bizarre nature of a country that, whether for good or bad, has been carefully controlled for generations.” —San Francisco Chronicle “An irresistible read . . . A rare and fascinating look at the tourist’s North Korea in a work that is humorous, appalling, and very sad. A highly recommended and revealing glimpse into a secretive land.” —Library Journal

The Paradox Hotel

The Paradox Hotel
Author: Rob Hart
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2023-02-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1984820664

“Time travel, murder, corruption, restless baby dinosaurs, and a snarky robot named Ruby collide in this excellent, noir-inflected, humor-infused, science-fiction thriller.”—The Boston Globe An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake. From the author of The Warehouse . . . ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Kirkus Reviews January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder. Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past. Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls. None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see. On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims. January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders. There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once. But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own. At once a dazzlingly time-twisting murder mystery and a story about grief, memory, and what it means to—literally—come face-to-face with our ghosts, The Paradox Hotel is another unforgettable speculative thrill ride from acclaimed author Rob Hart.

A Hotel is a Place ...

A Hotel is a Place ...
Author: Shelley Berman
Publisher: Price Stern Sloan
Total Pages: 108
Release: 1972
Genre: Bars (Drinking establishments)
ISBN: 9780843102116

Hotel Silence

Hotel Silence
Author: Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802165591

“[A] novel of mid-life redemption . . . Ólafsdóttir writes about a good man in crisis with a raw beauty, as he gradually awakens to life and love.” —Financial Times Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, Hotel Silence is a delightful and heartwarming new novel from Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, a writer who “upends expectations” (The New York Times). Jónas Ebeneser is a handy DIY kind of man with a compulsion to fix things, but he can’t seem to fix his own life. On the cusp of turning fifty, divorced, adrift, he’s recently discovered he is not the biological father of his daughter, Gudrun Waterlily, and he has sunk into an existential crisis, losing all will to live. As he visits his senile mother in a nursing home, he secretly muses on how, when, and where to put himself out of his misery. To prevent his only daughter from discovering his body, Jónas decides it’s best to die abroad. Armed with little more than his toolbox and a change of clothes, he flies to an unnamed country where the fumes of war still hover in the air. He books a room at the sparsely occupied Hotel Silence, in a small town riddled with landmines and the aftershocks of violence, and there he comes to understand the depths of other people’s scars while beginning to see his wounds in a new light. A celebration of life’s infinite possibilities, of transformations and second chances, Hotel Silence is a rousing story of a man, a community, and a path toward regeneration from the depths of despair.

Heads in Beds

Heads in Beds
Author: Jacob Tomsky
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-11-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385535643

In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry. “Highly amusing."—New York Times Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge. Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.