Maria Hummel is a novelist and poet. Her books include Goldenseal, Lesson in Red, a follow-up to Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize.
At Lit Hub she tagged five "marvelous literary hotels," including:
Cristina García, The Lady Matador’s HotelRead about another entry on the list.
In an unnamed Central American capital ravaged by civil war, six guests converge for a week, including a Japanese-Mexican-American matadora, a Cuban poet, a Korean manufacturer with an underage mistress, and an ex-guerilla. As a presidential campaign heats up, the guests find themselves embroiled in life-changing circumstances and their separate lives entwined.
Like many hotel novels, The Lady Matador’s Hotel is a sensual delight—the venues, the food, and the physicality of the characters rendered in bright, lush prose. Read it for the female bullfighting scenes alone.
Also see S.K. Golden's six mystery novels set in hotels and Mark Watson's ten top hotel novels.
--Marshal Zeringue