Read a New Short Story from Andrew Holleran

Author: William Johnson

August 16, 2013

Andrew Holleran fans rejoice! The summer issue of Granta contains a new work of fiction from the beloved author. The story, titled  “There’s a Small Hotel,”  is an affecting tale of a returning New Yorker’s reckoning with the city he once called home:

He hated having to stay in hotels – or rather the fact that he had once lived in New York City made him feel demoted to an inferior status when he came back on visits. Returning to Manhattan was like seeing someone who’d once been your lover but was now with someone else; like going back to a house you used to own but can no longer enter, so you park your car across the street and look at it from a distance. For a long while he did something like that. The first thing he would do when he came up out of the subway was walk over to a building on St Mark’s Place – as if his apartment should still be waiting for him, with the same lock, fitting the same key he had kept as a memento. But he’d lost the apartment when the building was sold and the new landlord discovered he was not living there full time. Now someone else was, and after a few trips back he stopped walking past the entrance to peer up at his old windows – which led to the issue of hotels, which led to the issue of money

Read the complete story here.

[via Granta]