Grand hotel
By: Vicki Baum ; translated from the German by Basil Creighton ; with revisions by Margot Bettauer Dembo ; introduction by Noah Isenberg
Contributors: Creighton, Basil, translator; Dembo, Margot Bettauer; Isenberg, Noah, writer of introduction
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9781590179673
Subjects: Hotels; Fiction
Work titles: Menschen im Hotel
Description: "A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum's celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he's been awaiting for years has arrived. Then there is Grusinskaya, a great ballerina now fighting a losing battle not so much against age as against her fear of it, and Gaigern, a sleek professional thief, who may or may not be made for each other. Herr Preysing also checks in, the director of a family firm that isn't as flourishing as it appears, who would never imagine that Kringelein, his underling, a timorous petty clerk he's bullied for years, has also come to Berlin, determined to live at last now that he's received a medical death sentence. All these characters and more, with their secret fears and hopes, come together and come alive in the pages of Baum's delicious and disturbing masterpiece"--
Notes: Translation from German of: Menschen im Hotel.

"Originally published as Menschen im Hotel in Berlin in 1929"--page vii.