Hotel of the Saints - Softcover

Hegi, Ursula

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743227166 ISBN 13: 9780743227162

Publisher: Touchstone, 2002

Synopsis

The bestselling author of Stones from the River and The Vision of Emma Blau renews her reputation as an extraordinary writer of short stories in this major collection that balances her reader on the magical border of laughter and sorrow.
In Hotel of the Saints, Hegi enters the perspectives of lovers and loners, eccentrics and artists, children and parents: a musician tries to protect her daughter from loving a blind man; a seminary student yearns for the certainty of faith that belonged to him as a boy; a woman transcends her embarrassment for her first love, who has tripled in size.
Ursula Hegi's bicultural background enriches these eleven luminous stories that are set in Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Her characters take risks in searching out the unique places where faith thrives for each of them -- a rundown hotel, the currents of Cabo San Lucas, the embrace of an ex-convict. And once again, she surrounds them with her elegant language and exquisite images.

About this title

Review:

Anyone who revels in the slow, gentle pace and cumulative power of Ursula Hegi's writing (Stones from the River) will delight in the 11 stories in Hotel of the Saints. In the title piece, a young Jesuit brother helps his aunt redecorate her hotel in a kitschy, irreverent celebration of the saints (the toilet seat in St. Sebastien's room is replaced with an old wooden one that pinches the user). In "Moonwalkers," a young man stands by his father's hospital bedside after his heart transplant, inwardly reviewing their troubled relationship while his father drifts into memorylike reverie of the 27-year-old woman whose donated heart beats inside him. "Lower Crossing" is about putting to sleep an elderly family dog--a friend, essentially, whose life is in the narrator's hands. Some of these stories seem underdeveloped, but all have an emotional force that eddies out from their often minor premises. These are lovely short works from one of America's best novelists. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Ursula Hegi is the author of The Worst Thing I've Done, Sacred Time, Hotel of the Saints, The Vision of Emma Blau, Tearing the Silence, Salt Dancers, Stones from the River, Floating in My Mother's Palm, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Intrusions, and Trudi & Pia. She teaches writing at Stonybrook's Southhampton Campus and she is the recipient of more than thirty grants and awards.

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743227166
• ISBN 13: 9780743227162
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 170