A little book of irony and wit and heartbreak ... At its heart, Hotels of North America is a close examination of the middle-aged American male in sexual, emotional and financial free fall * New York Times *
A little book that raises such big questions -- Eugenia Williamson * Boston Globe *
Moody's chilly, lacerating prose is a seduction * LA Times *
Praise for Rick Moody: 'Moody's powers of invention, his ease in his own prose, his ability to develop interesting characters - in short, his enormous gifts as a writer - are on full display here. * New York Times Book Review *
Entertaining and often poignant, probing the limits of technology, consciousness, and language in the face of grief. * New Yorker *
Remarkable, brave, and beautiful -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Rick Moody is one of our best writers * Washington Post *
Moody makes sure we know when the laughs should hurt ... never puts a foot wrong. * New York Times *
Rick Moody is one of the most prodigiously talented writers in America. * Wall Street Journal *
Bold and thrilling . . . Rick Moody has spirit and drive and talent to burn -- Walter Kirn * New York Times Book Review *
Sometimes swashbuckling, sometimes laserlike, Moody can spin out the absurdity of human behavior in giddy syntactic arabesques, or nail it with a single noun * Boston Globe *
How much more interesting a hotel review site might be if, instead of rating the cleanliness of the bathroom, the reviewer let rip on their emotional state on the night they stayed there ... the transient, anonymous world of motels, coupled with the atomised texture of online communication, gives strong poetic heft to what is, essentially, a novel about a lonely man talking into the dark. -- Claire Allfree * Daily Mail *
As always with Moody, the prose is the thing, and this book signals a return to the form of Purple America ... It is a distinctly Nabokovian inclination: the everyday tinged with the existential, the comic in the midst of the profound ... it is often funny and occasionally very beautiful -- Charlotte Jones * Guardian *
Funny and absurd ... with a keen eye for telling details -- Anna Fielding * Emerald Street *
I loved this book. It's one of the funniest things I've read for a very long time. I think it contains within it some truths about the middle aged male in the current era and possibly, conceivably, any era ... It could be a Smollett novel. -- David Aaronovitch * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review *
It was beautifully written and there were moments of real beauty, real tenderness and a lot of truth and honesty about being a middle-aged man. -- Emma Woolf * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review *
'It] was really moving, made me laugh a lot. -- Tom Sutcliffe * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review *
A treat ... a beady eye for the depressing details of hotel living ... His fiction comprises crisp, pacy writing, occasionally interrupted by set pieces made up of very long, percussive sentences ... Great music is often as much about restraint as virtuosity, though, and in the end, it's Moody's temperance that makes Hotels of North America work. The book manages to strike the right mix of humour and tenderness -- David Shaftel * FT *
