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by: Edmund White
List Price: $23.95Amazon.com's Price: $16.29 You Save: $7.66 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060852252
ISBN: 0060852259
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: September 01, 2007
Publisher: Ecco
Release Date: September 04, 2007
Sales Rank: 100627
Studio: Ecco
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In a damp, old sussex castle, American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane lies on his deathbed, wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. The world-famous author of The Red Badge of Courage has retreated to England with his wife, Cora, in part to avoid gossip about her ignominious past as the proprietress of a Florida bordello, the Hotel de Dream.
Though Crane's days are numbered, he and Cora live riotously, running up bills they'll never be able to pay, receiving visitors like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and even planning a mad dash to Germany's Black Forest, where Cora hopes a leading TB specialist will provide a miracle cure.
Then, in the midst of the confusion and gathering tragedy of their lives, Crane begins dictating a strange novel. The Painted Boy draws from Crane's erstwhile journalist days in New York in the 1890s, a poignant story about a boy prostitute and the married man who ruins his own life to win the boy's love. Crane originally planned the book as a companion piece to Maggie, Girl of the Streets, but abandoned it when literary friends convinced him that such scandalous subject matter would destroy his career. Now, with his last breath, Crane devotes himself to refashioning this powerful novel, into which he pours his fascination with the underworld, his sympathy for the poor, his experiences as a reporter among New York's lowlife—and his complex feelings for his own devoted wife.
Seamlessly flowing between the vibrant, seedy atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Manhattan and the quiet Sussex countryside, Hotel de Dream tenderly presents the double love stories of Cora and Crane, and the painted boy and his banker lover. The brilliant novel-within-a-novel combines the youthful simplicity of Crane's own prose with White's elegant sense of form, offering an unforgettable portrait of passion in all its guises.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - VIRTUOSIC AS EVER
Edmund White has dazzled us before. Those familiar with his writing know to expect perfectly constructed sentences delivering a compelling story. This book is no surprise. Here, the main character is Stephen Crane, the American writer who wrote "Red Badge of Courage" and "Maggie, A Girl of the Streets". Crane dictates a novel to his wife about a fifteen year old male hustler and a married banker that falls in love with him. The dictated novel (which in real life Crane never wrote) is interspersed ... Read More
Rating:  - A missed opportunity
Whether or not the reader accepts the author's hot-house premise (White himself calls the historical evidence for Crane's missing manuscript "uncertain" and "challenging material for a novelist"), the novel's twin stories still don't satisfy completely. Just 220 pages -- White is a quick tale-spinner -- the book's breathlessness is a major fault: realizing this fabrication could collapse at any time, White never lingers on the improbabilities (or awkwardness) of plot, nor seems bothered that the story of "the ... Read More
Rating:  - Edmund White writes another winner.
Edmund White has for a long time been one of the three or four most imaginative and original fiction writers in the United States, and he retains that title with Hotel de Dream, a unique recreation of what might have been a novel by Stephen Crane. Crane comes alive in White's words, as does the novel about a young male prostitute in New York in the early twentieth century. Brilliant, as always. Bravo, Edmund White.
Rating: - Not White's Best Work...Unfortunately
First, I think Edmund White is fabulous. I was so excited to get this book for Christmas. I read it within the first week of January, but despite the compelling concept of the book it left me wanting more. The story of the dying Stephen Crane, and parallel story of his unfinished work the painted boy, could have really been a monumental achievement. In the end, however, the prose reads a little flat, and ultimately despite interesting and sympathetic characters, the writing really doesn't draw you in enough to ... Read More
Rating: - 19th Century Twilight
Hotel de Dream, the latest novel from Edmund White, is a well-written exploration of a writer's last days and the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
The story's chief protagonist, famed American novelist Stephen Crane, is dying of Tubercolosis in the English countryside at the age of 28 as famous contemporaries, including Jospeh Conrad and Henry James, drop in to pay their final respects. His common-law wife, Cora, then accompanies him to Germany (by way of France and Switzerland) ... Read More
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