Hotel Life

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.