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Heartbreak HotelAuthor: Gabrielle Burton American Literature Series August 1999 320 pages, 6 x 9 Dimensions: Paperback, 1-56478-167-4 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.80—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
One is Daisy,
Two is Pearl,
Three is Rita,
Four is Meg,
Five is Gretchen,
Six is Maggie,
Seven's Quasi.
These are the residents of the Heartbreak Hotel, a way station for tour guides on mandatory rest leave from the Museum of the Revolution, located in Buffalo, New York. Twenty city blocks long, the Museum is exclusively devoted to the pains and pleasures of being female, with such exhibits as "The Menstrual Show" (performed in redface), "The Hard-to-Please Momma," the seductive "Man in the Blue Ford," "The Litany of the Clothes," and the infamous "Beauty Parlor."
Now the Museum is slated to be closed by the city fathers, who can't quite comprehend the fascination these exhibits hold for their visitors. Determined to block the action, the Hotel's residents—who include an unhappy comic, an aging cheerleader, an ex-nun, a bitter cop, an accomplished translator who speaks in tongues without an accent, and a woman with legs so beautiful that no one can stand not to touch them—reexamine the Museum, its contents, and its meaning for them as they make their plans to save it. Will they succeed? Or will the Museum's doors close forever?
Meanwhile, the hotel's seventh resident, Quasimodo, an unloved and unlovely hunchback, lies in the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital with her life hanging by a thread, the victim of a vicious hit-and-run motorcycle accident. Poor ugly Quasi: Will she live or die? Does anyone care? And two thousand miles away, Gretchen's Ma boards a Bluebird bus aimed straight for the heart of Heartbreak Hotel.
Fiercely funny, astonishingly inventive, Heartbreak Hotel maps both the familiar and the uncharted landscapes of women's lives. It is the recipient of the 1986 Maxwell Perkins Prize, awarded by Charles Scribner's Sons to a first novel of exceptional merit. This hypnotically brilliant literary debut introduces Gabrielle Burton as a passionate new voice in American fiction.
About the Author
| Gabrielle Burton, awarded an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute, currently splits her time between her Buffalo home and Los Angeles, where she is involved with her daughters' Five Sisters Production Company. Burton is the author of the nonfiction work I'm Running Away from Home, But I'm Not Allowed to Cross the Street: A Primer on Women's Liberation (1972). |
Praise
"Reading this novel is like watching a boisterous, surrealistic three-ring circus on the theme of being a woman in America . . . Women readers in particular will roar and cringe with recognition, and many will be swept up in Gabrielle Burton's triumphant vision."—New York Times"Surrealistic, wise-cracking, irreverent, and touching are a few apt terms for Burton's first novel . . . In its creativity, black humor, and attention to detail, this is an Americanized, feminized Finnegans Wake."—Library Journal
"The sum total is one of irresistible energy and well-honed perception. Winner of the Maxwell Perkins Prize, this book will have readers laughing and sighing with bittersweet recognition."—Booklist
"Heartbreak Hotel is one of the great under-recognized novels of the late twentieth century. It's Margaret Atwood on speed, George Orwell with a sex-change (and a sense of humor), Toni Morrison relocating her community of haunted women to upstate New York . . ."—Linda Gardiner, Women's Review of Books
"If Heartbreak Hotel doesn't make you laugh, perhaps you are no longer breathing. Check all vital signs of life, and read this book!"—Rita Mae Brown
"Burton writes with the grace of a poet playing the music of language . . . Women may experience a profound sense of relief that someone has actually named so many secrets; men may be astonished at what those secrets are . . . Heartbreak Hotel is ultimately a life-affirming book about the struggle to integrate the lessons of the past, the present and the future so that women and men—people—can move forward."—Pacific Sun
"The content of Heartbreak Hotel—the lives of women—is presented in a bold, sometimes aggressive, satirical, sometimes outraged fashion that leaves the reader not knowing whether to laugh or to rage or both . . . It is pointed, tongue-in-cheek, outrageous, maddening, triumphant. Read it."—San Diego Tribune
"In Heartbreak Hotel Gabrielle Burton creates both a brilliantly accurate metaphor for women's lives and a fable with a moral of hope. It's all wrapped up in a crazy montage of puns, bawdy stories and vignettes so on target the recognition can sting . . . These women, with their needs, uncertainties, energies and hopes, offer up a feminist vision full of promise and light. It's also a vision full of fun, balancing the crashingly serious treatises from many feminist authors."—South Bend Tribune
"Heartbreak Hotel puts into black and white what every woman has thought about at one time or other . . . Burton has a wonderful eye for detail and a great sense of humor . . . If you want to read a book that is guaranteed to change the way you think about women, this is it."—New Sunday Times (Malaysia)
"This is an angry book but one which neither blames nor excuses individuals for what the system has made them capable of making themselves. It treats little as sacred save self-respect and makes hilarious fun of every aspect of the sexual life . . . Burton has made a comforting patchwork quilt of a novel, whose excesses and successes owe as much to Rabelais as to Freidan."—Times Literary Supplement