Amanda Vaill's Blog

... That’s kind of how you feel when you’re waiting for the public unveiling of something you’ve spent years of work and emotional, psychological, and intellectual capital on: as if you’re walking unprotected into a falling rock zone.

Fortunately, the first substantial “public” review of Hotel Florida has just appeared – early! – in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and it’s not a falling rock, it’s a bouquet….

To read more, go to http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

This month a glossy new print-and-digital magazine, Porter, a publication of the web-boutique operation Net-a-Porter, is running an article I wrote called “In Love and War.” Here’s a teaser:

In Sam Wood’s 1943 film of For Whom the Bell Tolls,, adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel of the same name, the tension between love and war seems not only powerful but inevitable – a classic, if not clichéd, juxtaposition of opposites. But in fact until the time in which the movie (and the novel) is set, you’d have been hard put to find love and war literally in the same frame….,

To read more, go to http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

Hotel Florida won’t be published until April 22, and most bookstores won’t have stock until then (and certainly online booksellers won’t ship it until then). Normally I wouldn’t be making promotional appearances until then either; but I’m giving audiences an early taste of the book….

To read more, go here: http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

Seventy-five years ago the Spanish Civil War ended, not with the decisive battle that some (including Ernest Hemingway) had been predicting, but with the unopposed entry of the rebellious Nationalists into Madrid.

We’re still feeling the aftershocks of that war, and I’ll be writing more about that in the weeks to come. But for now I thought I’d post a snippet from the epilogue to Hotel Florida which describes what happened in Spain, and in Europe, after the cessation of hostilities. It doesn’t make very comforting reading.

On March 27, 1939, Madrid – the city that Ernest Hemingway had proclaimed Francisco Franco “must” take if he were to win the civil war – surrendered without a fight to the Nationalist army. Three days later, on April 1, the Caudillo issued a final bulletin from his headquarters: “Today, with the Red Army captive and disarmed, our victorious troops have achieved their objectives.” On the same day the United States recognized the Nationalist rebels as the legitimate government of Spain….

To read more, go to http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

And please come hear me read and talk about Hotel Florida with renowned World War II suspense novelist Joseph Kanon at @Macaulay Author Series, Tuesday, April 8 at 7 pm. You can rsvp here: http://macaulay.cuny.edu/community/rs...

In the aftermath of Pete Seeger’s death, someone posted a link to a concert he gave in Barcelona, in 1993. At this event – remarkably, considering that Francisco Franco had died little more than a decade previously – Seeger sang “Viva La Quince Brigada”….

Read the whole thing here: http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

You always think, even when you know better, that when you finish a manuscript you are done. People say to you, "Isn't it wonderful to be finished?" and you nod and smile stupidly and agree. And then it hits you: you are so not finished….

Read the whole thing here:
http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

The first responses are in from those who were sent advance reading copies of Hotel Florida , and they are more than I could ever have hoped for. The thing that is most gratifying about them is that this extraordinary and extraordinarily diverse group of writers and scholars seem to sound many of the same notes: they're writing about the same book. It's a wonderful feeling.

To see what they say, go here: http://amandavaill.com/Books.html

…. I’m thrilled to share a very early response to the book that indicates someone else feels the same way: a pre-publication “alert” by Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal, one of the bellwethers of the book trade. Here’s what she says:

“Vaill here does for 1930s Spain what she did for 1920s Paris in Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy—A Lost Generation Love Story. She illuminates a cataclysmic time and place through the lives of intriguing individuals….History lovers will melt.”

To read more, go here: http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

Robert Capa, one of the greatest twentieth century photojournalists, who died when he stepped on a landmine in Indochina in 1954, would have been 100 years old today. Perhaps his premature demise conferred a kind of eternal youth on him, but the fact remains that sixty years after his death he is still surprising us. In 2010 an exhibit of long-lost photographic negatives of the Spanish Civil War by him and his colleagues Gerda Taro and David Seymour (Chim) opened at the International Center of Photography (ICP), where his archives reside, and to which the recovered negatives, which disappeared in 1939, were repatriated from Mexico. And today, on his birthday, ICP has revealed the acquisition of a rare radio interview in which Capa, then at the peak of his career, having covered most of the European theater of World War II at close range, discusses his work with the broadcasters Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg….

To read the whole thing (and get a link to the radio interview), go to my blog: http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...

The two English-language publishers for my forthcoming book, Hotel Florida, have now pretty much finalized their jacket designs; and I’m struck not only by the elegance of each design, but by the differences between them. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in New York, have (with my encouragement, it must be said) gone the panoramic, movie-poster route: a gorgeous montage of some of the faces and places that feature in the book. Bloomsbury, in London, have opted for an elegiac and elegant approach, in which a single image – a Robert Capa photo – stands, metonymically (is that a word? if it isn’t, it should be), for Hotel Florida’s themes and characters.....


Read the whole thing (and look at images) here: http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...