- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
The Commercial Hotel
About this book
When John Summers moved to a small town in the Wairarapa and began to look closely at the less-celebrated aspects of local life – our club rooms, freezing works, night trains, hotel pubs, landfills – he saw something deeper. It was a story about his own life, but mostly about a place and its people. The story was about life and death in New Zealand. Combining reportage and memoir, The Commercial Hotel is a sharp-eyed, poignant yet often hilarious tour of Aotearoa: a place in which Arcoroc mugs and dog-eared political biographies are as much a part of the scenery as the hills we tramp through ill-equipped. We encounter Elvis impersonators, the eccentric French horn player and adventurer Bernard Shapiro, Norman Kirk balancing timber on his handlebars while cycling to his building site, and Summers' s grandmother: the only woman imprisoned in New Zealand for protesting World War Two. And we meet the ghosts who haunt our loneliest spaces. As he follows each of his preoccupations, Summers reveals to us a place we have never quite seen before. ' Clever, funny, boundlessly curious, The Commercial Hotel is a dazzling New Zealand opportunity shop, floor to ceiling with lost books and impos
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access The Commercial Hotel by John Summers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Essays. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- On Coral Islands
- What You Get, What’ve We Got
- The Dehydrated Giant
- Grassroots Elvis
- Living Springs
- The House that Norm Built
- Missing
- Hard Sleep
- Eeling
- Amateurs
- Notes on Macrocarpa
- Sex Elevator
- The Clearing
- Boatermaster
- Temperament
- Smoke and Glass
- The Commercial Hotel: A Discussion
- A Light Left Burning
- At the Dump
- The Adventures of Bernard Shapiro
- These Ghosts
- Select Bibliography
- Acknowledgements