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Men in Miami Hotels
From Charlie Smith, critically acclaimed poet and author of Three Delays, comes a thrilling, moving, and sun-dappled noir
Cotland Sims, a gangster from Miami, must come home to Key West because his mother's house has fallen off its stilts. For a long time, maybe since always, he's been estranged from his distant, combative mother, who is only now, in her old age, beginning to soften, starting to circle back to Cot, the son she had disowned. Motivated by the chance to help his mother (along with collateral financial gain), Cot decides to snatch a trove of emeralds that his boss back in Miami, the relentlessly vicious Albertson, kept hidden on a small island. And that's when the trouble starts. Cot has 48 hours to return the emeralds before he and his family--his younger, slow-minded brother; his life-long, pseudo-girlfriend; his wise, wary mother--are all killed.
This tropical thriller becomes a dark fight for survival and a struggle for existential sustenance. By the end, there are heart-breaking deaths, maddening betrayals, and enough shots fired to fill a pool with bullets.
Book Details
- Publisher: Harper Perennial
- Publish Date: Jul 2nd, 2013
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.40in - 0.80in - 0.50lb
- EAN: 9780062247278
- Categories: • Literary• Crime• Hispanic & Latino - General
About the Author
Smith, Charlie: -
Charlie Smith is the author of eight novels and eight books of poetry. He has won numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the Aga Khan Prize, the Levinson Prize, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. Five of his books have been named as New York Times Notable Books of the Year or as Editors' Choices. He lives in New York City.
Praise for this book
"The book soars and scuffles according to the logic of its language rather than plot; it's a quietly masterful work by Charlie Smith, an award-winning poet and novelist." - Los Angeles Times
"Like Under the Volcano, fueled by every drug in the world instead of mezcal, Charlie Smith's first novel in fourteen years tracks a pair of twisted lovers across hot and sweaty locales." - Daily Candy, Summer Reading List
"In his sixth novel, his startling, rhapsodic descriptions are mind-blowing, as are his feral, weirdly smart, self-destructive characters, their lashing dialogue, and their insane, heartbreaking predicaments. This isn't Smith's first tale of toxic and nihilistic obsession, but it is his most ravishing, painfully funny, and wildly mythic....This is infernal romance--hallucinatory, wanton, noirish, terrifying, and magnificently tragic." - Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
"Hallucinatory ... a cataract of gorgeous sentences, a paean to a lurid, lavish, buzzing and heart-pulping world. ... And its absolute apartness--in its gasping energy, in the ravishing excess of Charlie Smith's prose--is something to be celebrated." - New York Times Book Review
"Three Delays is so stunningly composed, so wildly, implausibly, excessively written, that it makes the entire shelf of novels from the last generation superfluous...this book consists almost entirely of the incantatory, rebel-angel prose that has made Charlie Smith a consummate outsider, and also one of the very best prose writers in contemporary letters." - Rick Moody, The Believer
"Smith's prose is pitch perfect and fierce, and I'm always glad to find myself on a ride through his America, in the company of his Americans and the dark, absurd tumult of their passionate follies." - Philip Gourevitch, New Yorker
"[T]he perfect summer read, especially if you like your summer reads perfectly offbeat...Men in Miami Hotels reads like a suspenser by Elmore Leonard, if Leonard were having a fever dream....He writes like an angel, an angel...with a broken heart." - Kurt Rabin, Free Lance-Star
"In the end I was too interested in the unexpected plot, too surprised by his characters, too taken with his turns of phrase, to reject him. I was also too seduced by the island sounds and scent of the coastal foliage, the softer, lovelier side of the Orientalist gaze." - Lydia Kiesling, The Millions
"Men in Miami Hotels is lyrical in that it is beautiful and that it is composed by a person with high poetic sensibilities. Charlie Smith is a prolific poet; not only is his writing poetic, his characters are all poets in spirit if not occupation....Smith's style is stylish enough that I was prepared initially to square myself against it. In the end I was too interested in the unexpected plot, too surprised by his characters, to taken with his turns of phrase, to reject him. I was also too seduced by the island sounds and scent of the coastal foliage, the softer, lovelier side of the Orientalist gaze." - Lydia Kiesling, The Millions
"Charlie Smith is one of America's top unsung heroes of literature. His new novel evokes the atmospheric mood of Key West and Havana. The action is casually explosive as career criminal Cot Sims confronts his past, his true love, and his true nature. Come for the character and the story, but stay for the beautiful prose-intricate and lyric and startling. I loved this book." - Chris Offutt, author of No Heroes and The Same River Twice
"Charlie Smith is one of America's top unsung heroes of literature...The action is casually explosive as career criminal Cot Sims confronts his past, his true love, and his true nature. Come for the character and the story, but stay for the beautiful prose--intricate and lyric and startling." - Chris Offutt, author of No Heroes and The Same River Twice
"A mastery such as Smith's is rare, and...the bounties furnished are great: pearls of understanding that circle some kind of holy instruction; the author's gifts to us for better navigation in our own stories; and tools that we will access long after the precise arrangement of words has left us." - Kathleen Alcott, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Smith's edgy prose is as arresting as Miami art deco, and the psychology at work here is as tangled and dark as a mangrove swamp....Smith turns a rogue gangster's tale into a glimmering, sharply faceted, hauntingly philosophical tragedy of cosmic flaws, stunning betrayals, and bloody revenge." - Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"Smith writes in a curious blend of registers that has the narrative drive of an airplane read and the mystical resonance of verse...The result is a haunting and starkly grim fantasia on love, mourning, and the alienation inflicted by time." - Publishers Weekly
"Charlie Smith's terrific new novel...walks a line between genre and something considerably wilder, a fictional territory where a character might lose his or her soul...where narrative arises out of language, and scenes are important less for what happens in them than for how they are described." - David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"With exquisite nonchalance, Mr. Smith follows the doings of his smart, witty gangsters (and other characters) in this exciting novel of love, danger, and intrigue. But he does something else as well: with an expert hand, he incorporates the sheer joy of being alive. Bravo to him for this bold gift to us. Although all of his books are a treat for the discerning reader, this tale is his streetwise, life-affirming masterwork." - Paul West, author of The Tent of Orange Mist
"With exquisite nonchalance, Smith follows his smart, witty gangsters in this exciting novel of love, danger, and intrigue. He does something else as well: he incorporates the sheer joy of being alive. Bravo to him for this bold gift to us...This tale is his streetwise, life-affirming masterwork." - Paul West, author of The Tent of Orange Mist
"Charlie Smith fills language with so much life that his fictional worlds take on an uncanny substance. We can taste those mackerel fillets straight out of the old metal drum smoker, inhale the smell of starlight, and share the guilty exhilaration as Cot slips and slides his way toward survival." - Joanna Scott, author of Follow Me
"Smith writes some of the most elaborately beautiful sentences of any writer living today, and in Men in Miami Hotels, these sentences coil dreamily around the lush Floridian landscape, the loved women wrinkling before Cot's eyes, the undignified final breaths breathed in sudden bloodbaths." - Tracy O'Neill, L Magazine
"What's better for your poolside reading than a good old literary gangster novel? That's what you'll get and more from the always excellent Charlie Smith, who manages to spin a violent tale with uncommon poeticism and knockout sentences." - Emily Temple, Flavorwire
"In Smith's masterfully lyrical prose, what could have been a simple pulpy adventure becomes a rewarding, and even challenging, examination of time, fate and fatalism that recalls the best work of Denis Johnson or Robert Stone." - Nicholas Mancusi, Miami Herald
"Like Under the Volcano, fueled by every drug in the world instead of mezcal, Charlie Smith's first novel in fourteen years tracks a pair of twisted lovers across hot and sweaty locales." - Daily Candy, Summer Reading List
"In his sixth novel, his startling, rhapsodic descriptions are mind-blowing, as are his feral, weirdly smart, self-destructive characters, their lashing dialogue, and their insane, heartbreaking predicaments. This isn't Smith's first tale of toxic and nihilistic obsession, but it is his most ravishing, painfully funny, and wildly mythic....This is infernal romance--hallucinatory, wanton, noirish, terrifying, and magnificently tragic." - Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
"Hallucinatory ... a cataract of gorgeous sentences, a paean to a lurid, lavish, buzzing and heart-pulping world. ... And its absolute apartness--in its gasping energy, in the ravishing excess of Charlie Smith's prose--is something to be celebrated." - New York Times Book Review
"Three Delays is so stunningly composed, so wildly, implausibly, excessively written, that it makes the entire shelf of novels from the last generation superfluous...this book consists almost entirely of the incantatory, rebel-angel prose that has made Charlie Smith a consummate outsider, and also one of the very best prose writers in contemporary letters." - Rick Moody, The Believer
"Smith's prose is pitch perfect and fierce, and I'm always glad to find myself on a ride through his America, in the company of his Americans and the dark, absurd tumult of their passionate follies." - Philip Gourevitch, New Yorker
"[T]he perfect summer read, especially if you like your summer reads perfectly offbeat...Men in Miami Hotels reads like a suspenser by Elmore Leonard, if Leonard were having a fever dream....He writes like an angel, an angel...with a broken heart." - Kurt Rabin, Free Lance-Star
"In the end I was too interested in the unexpected plot, too surprised by his characters, too taken with his turns of phrase, to reject him. I was also too seduced by the island sounds and scent of the coastal foliage, the softer, lovelier side of the Orientalist gaze." - Lydia Kiesling, The Millions
"Men in Miami Hotels is lyrical in that it is beautiful and that it is composed by a person with high poetic sensibilities. Charlie Smith is a prolific poet; not only is his writing poetic, his characters are all poets in spirit if not occupation....Smith's style is stylish enough that I was prepared initially to square myself against it. In the end I was too interested in the unexpected plot, too surprised by his characters, to taken with his turns of phrase, to reject him. I was also too seduced by the island sounds and scent of the coastal foliage, the softer, lovelier side of the Orientalist gaze." - Lydia Kiesling, The Millions
"Charlie Smith is one of America's top unsung heroes of literature. His new novel evokes the atmospheric mood of Key West and Havana. The action is casually explosive as career criminal Cot Sims confronts his past, his true love, and his true nature. Come for the character and the story, but stay for the beautiful prose-intricate and lyric and startling. I loved this book." - Chris Offutt, author of No Heroes and The Same River Twice
"Charlie Smith is one of America's top unsung heroes of literature...The action is casually explosive as career criminal Cot Sims confronts his past, his true love, and his true nature. Come for the character and the story, but stay for the beautiful prose--intricate and lyric and startling." - Chris Offutt, author of No Heroes and The Same River Twice
"A mastery such as Smith's is rare, and...the bounties furnished are great: pearls of understanding that circle some kind of holy instruction; the author's gifts to us for better navigation in our own stories; and tools that we will access long after the precise arrangement of words has left us." - Kathleen Alcott, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Smith's edgy prose is as arresting as Miami art deco, and the psychology at work here is as tangled and dark as a mangrove swamp....Smith turns a rogue gangster's tale into a glimmering, sharply faceted, hauntingly philosophical tragedy of cosmic flaws, stunning betrayals, and bloody revenge." - Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"Smith writes in a curious blend of registers that has the narrative drive of an airplane read and the mystical resonance of verse...The result is a haunting and starkly grim fantasia on love, mourning, and the alienation inflicted by time." - Publishers Weekly
"Charlie Smith's terrific new novel...walks a line between genre and something considerably wilder, a fictional territory where a character might lose his or her soul...where narrative arises out of language, and scenes are important less for what happens in them than for how they are described." - David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"With exquisite nonchalance, Mr. Smith follows the doings of his smart, witty gangsters (and other characters) in this exciting novel of love, danger, and intrigue. But he does something else as well: with an expert hand, he incorporates the sheer joy of being alive. Bravo to him for this bold gift to us. Although all of his books are a treat for the discerning reader, this tale is his streetwise, life-affirming masterwork." - Paul West, author of The Tent of Orange Mist
"With exquisite nonchalance, Smith follows his smart, witty gangsters in this exciting novel of love, danger, and intrigue. He does something else as well: he incorporates the sheer joy of being alive. Bravo to him for this bold gift to us...This tale is his streetwise, life-affirming masterwork." - Paul West, author of The Tent of Orange Mist
"Charlie Smith fills language with so much life that his fictional worlds take on an uncanny substance. We can taste those mackerel fillets straight out of the old metal drum smoker, inhale the smell of starlight, and share the guilty exhilaration as Cot slips and slides his way toward survival." - Joanna Scott, author of Follow Me
"Smith writes some of the most elaborately beautiful sentences of any writer living today, and in Men in Miami Hotels, these sentences coil dreamily around the lush Floridian landscape, the loved women wrinkling before Cot's eyes, the undignified final breaths breathed in sudden bloodbaths." - Tracy O'Neill, L Magazine
"What's better for your poolside reading than a good old literary gangster novel? That's what you'll get and more from the always excellent Charlie Smith, who manages to spin a violent tale with uncommon poeticism and knockout sentences." - Emily Temple, Flavorwire
"In Smith's masterfully lyrical prose, what could have been a simple pulpy adventure becomes a rewarding, and even challenging, examination of time, fate and fatalism that recalls the best work of Denis Johnson or Robert Stone." - Nicholas Mancusi, Miami Herald