Laura Van Den Berg, "The Third Hotel"

Laura Van Den Berg discusses her novel, "The Third Hotel", at Politics and Prose on 8/13/18.

Van den Berg’s second novel is set in Havana where the recently widowed Clare is attending the Festival of New Latin American Cinema. Her husband had been a film professor, and after she attends a movie he’d especially wanted to see, she finds him standing outside. As she pursues what can only be a ghost, Clare witnesses strange, even impossible occurrences. Reality becomes a mélange of memories, dreams, and hallucinations. Yet certain inescapable truths about her marriage lurk within this shadow play. Writing with uncanny emotional power, van den Berg, author of the award-winning story collection The Isle of Youth and the novel Find Me, has produced an urgent and visceral portrait of loss and deception. Van den Berg is in conversation with Maud Casey, author of The Art of Mystery.

Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novel Find Me. Her fiction has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Born and raised in Florida, she lives in Cambridge, MA, with her husband and dog.

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Produced by Tom Warren