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Praise for The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire:
A brilliant book - an ecstatic book - inevitably, an elegiac book. And one which - like some operas, certain voices - has the capacity to provoke - in this reader and opera-lover, anyway - admiration, rapture, identification.—Susan Sontag |
| A high-spirited and very personal book...laced with moral reflections and warmed with comedy...A work of formidable and curious learning...A dazzling performance. —New York Times Book Review |
Praise for Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon:
Dazzling, exuberant...Koestenbaum writes with a heady lyricism that makes Jackie-watching an exercise of the soul as well as of the intellect.—New York Magazine |
Praise for Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics:
Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity.—John Waters |
Praise for Moira Orfei:
Written in the style of a surreal fever dream, Wayne Koestenbaum's first novel records in brilliant poetic vernacular the swan song of Theo Mangrove, a dissipated concert pianist and debauched sexual adventurer obsessed with the Italian circus star Moira Orfei...The story of Koestenbaum's all-too-human freaks of nature is delivered in willfully, at times hilariously debauched deadpan and makes for irresistibly twisted magic. How could a reader not delight in the fiercely rendered hallucination of it all?—Bookforum | |
Hotel Theory
Wayne Koestenbaum
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| Paper | 6 1/2" by 8 1/2" | 192 pgs. | ISBN: 1-933368-69-1 | List: $16.00 | 08/1/2007 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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Featuring: Click here for an excerpt, courtesy of our fine friends at OPEN CITY magazine!
About the book: Hotel Theory is actually two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of a hotels, and a dime-novel (Hotel Women), featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. (In the novel, the articles �a,� �an,� and �the� never appear.) The two books, fiction and nonfiction, run concurrently, in twin columns.
The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author's dreams, in literature, in film, and in history. Guest-stars in the nonfiction portion of the book are Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Martin Heidegger, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Auster, and many, many others. Hotel Theory gives voice - in divided fashion - to an aesthetic of indifference, of stupor, of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. The lassitude of the hotel-dweller (and, of the postmodern subject), in Hotel Theory, finds expression and a momentary soapbox. The book is an oblique manifesto for a philosophy of being-here, being-anywhere. Hotel Theory is also a book about the disappearance of writing, in particular, of Walter Benjamin's suicide in a hotel room in Portbou, Spain. Hotel Theory is the place where writing disappears; it is also the locale where a new mode of theorizing (in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest) makes itself felt.
About the author: Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of several works of cultural criticism including The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics; the Penguin Lives biography of Andy Warhol; and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. He is also the author of a novel "Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes and five collections of poetry, Best-selling Jewish Porn Films, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, The Milk of Inquiry, and Model Homes.
This author is on tour: See events page for details. |
