Here is my latest book review for the Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-higgins2sep02,0,5788030.story?coll=la-books-center
What I wanted to add, but could not in my 350-word space:
Koestenbaum started writing Hotel Theory in January 2002 - only a few months after September 11th. In the opening dossier, he says he was "broken." He checked into "Hotel Heidegger" for "one cold, difficult month" and "thought nonstop about hotels." With the two books inside this volume - "Hotel Theory" and "Hotel Women" - running in columns side-by-side, I cannot help but see the Twin Towers. Their very absence in the text evokes them more strongly, just as "not-being-at-home," in Koestenbaum's explication of Heidegger, is more primordial than "being-at-home." And at the end, when "Hotel Women" ends first - not long after Lana Turner and Liberace visit their hotel bomb shelter in preparation for the apocalypse - I cannot help but think of tower one as it falls. When "Hotel Theory" dissolves into fragments and disappears, I see the slow-motion collapse of tower two. And then only blankness - being "in hotel," as Koestenbaum was. And we are now.