Maria Hummel is a novelist and poet. Her books include Goldenseal, Lesson in Red, a follow-up to Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize.
At Lit Hub she tagged five "marvelous literary hotels," including:
Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of EnglandRead about the other entries on the list.
A cult favorite of many writers, this wonderful picaresque novel follows Ditie, who starts as a “tiny busboy’ and evolves,adventure by adventure, into a waiter and then the owner of a hotel. Hrabal’s humor-laced chapters blend satiric commentary on the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia with an adoring interest in the novel’s women and the meals Ditie serves to royalty. When the hotel kitchen produces a camel stuffed with two antelopes, twenty turkeys, fish, and hundreds of hard-boiled eggs, the turducken gets a memorable twist.
Despite the comic tone, the fact that Ditie never actually serves the King of England underscores the novel’s poignant depiction of a dreamer in a time of painful social change.
Also see S.K. Golden's six mystery novels set in hotels and Mark Watson's ten top hotel novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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