The Occidental Hotel [Paperback]

Mayss passion for art electrifies fascinating sketches of Beuys. -Quill and Quire

A brooding fugitive hides out in a crumbling hotel that was once filled with celebrities enjoying the successes of postwar America. He is a racist with a criminal past, an anti-hero who reflects on the ruins of the South and simultaneously on the life of a German performance artist called Jupp . The fictional Jupp is a thinly-veiled cipher for the late real-life German artist, Joseph Beuys, and the photos in the novel are photos of the performances by the controversial Beuys. At once echoing the moody worlds of W. G. Sebald and incorporating outrageous elements of pulp fiction, this novel of dark romanticism is not for optimists seeking redemption, but for those willing to take a look into a searing heart of darkness.

Anne Collins is the publisher of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, which includes the imprints Knopf Canada and Random House Canada; she has been a vice president of the company that is now Penguin Random House Canada since 1998. What that role means is that she is responsible for the publishing careers of about 350 Canadian authors of fiction and non-fiction, as well as publishing close roughly 175 international authors whose work is of particular interest to Canadian readers. Mays was born in rural Louisiana in 1941. Both his parents died when he was a child, his father in a car accident and his mother of cancer, and he was raised thereafter by relatives in Shreveport. He studied medieval literature and literary criticism at the University of Rochester, and moved to Toronto in 1969 to accept a teaching job at York University. He married Margaret Cannon in 1971, and published his first novel, The Spiral Stair, in 1978. He joined The Globe and Mail in 1980. In 1994 he published Emerald City: Toronto Visited, a collection of essays about Toronto architecture and history. The following year he published In the Jaws of the Black Dogs,lƒ&