Hotel De Dream - Hardcover

Rare Book

'Edmund White is one of the three or four most virtuousic living writers of
sentences in the English language' -- Dave Eggers

'The book is a marvel of the subtle layers of storytelling, and at every
layer it is fascinating, tragic, and utterly beautiful' -- Ann Patchett

`An intriguing, multi-layered portrayal of turn-of-the-century life' -- Gay Times

`For nineteenth-century writers from Proust to Robert Louis Stevenson, the sickbed proved an enchanted realm of imaginative exploration. In the elegant, melancholy and spirited confection that is Hotel de Dream, Edmund White - and Stephen Crane - continue the tradition with grace' -- Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

`It may be fiction but what emerges in this novel within a novel is a paean to the different sorts of male loneliness: that of the writer, desperate for his last story to be heard; that of beautiful, abused Elliott; and, most of all, that of thwarted male love' -- Claire Allfree, Metro

`White's imaginative recreations of Crane's work provide the novel's best passages ... White's mimetic prose is marvellously convincing ... an engrossing book that memorably depicts gay life in an era when homosexuality was accommodated but never accepted' -- Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times

`As much as an account of sexual fascination, this is a novel about uneasy literary friendships. Among the many transplanted Americans visiting the Cranes is a vividly depicted Henry James ... More than a mere tale of homoerotic longing, the masterfully multi-layered Hotel de Dream is an illuminating commentary on storytelling and on the distance that separates life from fiction'
-- Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times Magazine

`Edmund White is one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language' -- Dave Eggers

`In a short note tucked away at the back of the book, White modestly categorises this marvellously compelling and moving story as "a fantasia on real themes provided by history" ... In short, pungent chapters - as intimate as pages torn from a diary, as bluntly cropped as photographs - the novel shuttles the reader between three cunningly interwoven stories ... Like the loves they describe, the sentences of the book are eccentric, disgracefully funny and shockingly beautiful by turns; determined both to describe the world as it really is and to invent it anew. Crane's death, in particular, is one of the finest things White has yet written ... When, as here, he is at the top of his form, White simply does it better than most' -- Neil Bartlett, Guardian

`When Edmund White writes about Stephen Crane, it is the case of one American master turning his attention to another. The book is a marvel of the subtle layers of story-telling, and at every layer it is fascinating, tragic and utterly beautiful' -- Ann Patchett