NEWS & BRIEF RECOMMENDATIONS
I HOLD A WOLF BY THE EARS: STORIES will be out on June 9th! Check out the cover reveal and this essay on how the collection came to be over at Entertainment Weekly. You can pre-order WOLF here.
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The paperback for THE THIRD HOTEL will be out from Picador on August 13th! Pick up this highly portable version at your local indie and wherever else books are sold. Picador has put together an excellent Reader Discussion Guide (hi book clubs!), which can be found here. If you’re interested in contacting Laura for an event, please see the information listed on the contact page.
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The Third Hotel is a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award! Congratulations to the other finalists!
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I’m excited to share two new short stories: “Last Night,” published in Electric Literature, and “Your Second Wife,” published in Lenny Letter. Both these stories are part of my next collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.
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The Third Hotel is officially out in the world! The novel is an August 2018 IndieNext Selection and has been named a Summer 2018 Read by The Washington Post, Vulture, Nylon, Elle, BBC, InStyle, O, the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Conde Nast Traveler, Southern Living, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. The Third Hotel has also gotten stellar reviews from Washington Post, Time, Boston Globe, O, The Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and NPR (and more!). You can read an excerpt over at Buzzfeed or a different one at Work-in-Progress. You should be able to pick a copy wherever books are sold, including your local indie or via Indiebound. For more reviews and interviews, you can go here. And thank you for reading.
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The Third Hotel grew, in part, out of my deep interest in the genre of the “travel novel,” and I’m always on the lookout for books that challenge and investigate the conventions of the genre, that do something new with it. And all the great travel novels are, of course, much bigger than the journeys their characters take. A few recent favorites include Marie Ndiaye’s Ladivine; Katie Kitamura’s A Separation; Juan Villoro’s The Reef ; Chris Kraus’s Torpor; and Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room. Even more recently, I would add Cristina García’s Here in Berlin to that list. At first glance, the novel appears to be about a woman—referred to as The Visitor—traveling around Berlin, but then splinters into a wide array of voices, speaking about different histories, different moments in time. With an innovative structure and stunning prose, these individual stories, anchored by the presence of The Visitor, illuminate some of the most anguished and secretive corners of human history.
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Fleur Jaeggy writes the best opening lines. For example: “The pain her son had caused her by choosing to die on a day in spring was less than she had expected.” (from I Am the Brother of XX).
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THE THIRD HOTEL is one of Buzzfeed’s 33 Most Exciting New Books of 2018!
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For most authors, the moment when you see a prospective cover for the first time is both very exciting and a bit fraught. Thankfully I was in wonderful hands with Sarahmay Wilkinson at FSG, whose illustrations are also featured on this site. When FSG’s Work-in-Progress did the cover reveal for The Third Hotel, they included an interview with Sarahmay. I find the creative process for cover designers fascinating and when Sarahmay said that “I tend to start and end on the computer, but the middle is always a mystery”—I also thought hey, that sounds an awful lot like novel writing, that bit about the middle being a mystery.
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