While most hotels are bending over backwards to give their guests the latest in-room technology, The Standard Hotel is going back to basics. They're certainly not removing the hi-def flatscreens or Apple Docks, but they'll be adding good old-fashioned paper-pages books (not Kindles, not Nooks) to each of their 337 rooms. If it doesn't sound flashy enough, wait—there's more. They've tapped none other than celebrated novelist Salman Rushdie to do the curating.
Rushdie’s reading list, comprised of 13 American selections, is not a marketing ploy to sell more copies of his Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children. Instead, the in-room book program is timed to coincide with PEN’s World Voices Festival of International Literature, which is being held at the Standard along with other venues around the city from April 25th to May1st. Rushdie is the chairman of this year’s PEN festival, the literary and human rights organization that brings together more than 100 writers from 40 nations for this event each year.
Starting on Monday, guests will find one copy from Rushdie’s selections in their rooms. The copies are worn-in donations from Housing Works, the charitable thrift store chain. “The core element of literature is what? It’s a used, worn copy of a book. So nothing can beat that,” Laszlo Jakab Orsos, the festival’s director told Reuters. “These books are going to be on the nightstands until they disappear.”
Rushdie’s Reading List:
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Eudora Welty: The Collected Stories
Bernard Malamud: The Complete Stories
Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint
Flannery O’Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five
Thomas Pynchon: V.
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Toni Morrison: Beloved
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
No comments:
Post a Comment