The provocative and challenging prize-winning novel from Gabrielle B. Burton about seven women living in a shared house who work at The Museum of the Revolution.
Reviews
“Burton’s fantastic novel gives us a glimpse of a future world that is as far away as last week’s phone call from your mother.” — Gloria Steinem
“A wild, manic, committed, exhilarating, wonderful work, which moves the reader from tears to outrage to delight to mirth at the turn of each anarchic page, and does more for women (not to mention literature) than anything I have read for a decade. A novel to take us into the next century, heads high and flags flying.” — Fay Weldon
“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.”— 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)
“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
“The novel is at various times a romp, a roar, and a scream (and take that descriptor every which way)… Look in it through the past to see a future for women as well as one compelling primer of women’s postmodern fiction.”— Mary E. Papke, “What do Women Want?”, Context Literary Journal
“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
“Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel runs each of its engines at full capacity. It is completely intelligent, completely feminist, completely hilarious, completely furious, completely compassionate, and it does the whole thing inside out…little bits Gilda Radner and Silver Palate Cookbook. The book is a joyride…you’re gonna love it.” — Katie Spencer, Fringe
“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