Overview

A quirkily humorous, erotic, tender, tumultuous and at times surreal debut collection of ten stories set in hotels and roadside motels across America and the border, tracing moments of uncertainty and precipitous change. Photographs by Naida Osline inspire and propel the action. In this author-artist collaboration, Tyler Stallings explores themes of heartbreak, defiance, love, and escape. A hotel housekeeper surreptitiously replaces mass-produced art with her late sister’s vibrant watercolors. A disgraced curator returns to his hometown to confront the city’s historical role in the slave trade. An unlikely love triangle takes shape as a young skater drifts into the orbit of two aging lovers. Memories and internal conflicts haunt a wildfire-fighter as his career falters, and in a bar in Chapala, Mexico, a retired American high school English teacher compiles an improvised dictionary of the word gringo, recording absurd and painful fragments of expatriate life. Across ten linked stories, lives shift and reset in hotels and roadside motels—transitional spaces where unspoken and unseen aspects of American life come briefly into view.

Full Product Details

9781954600515

Table of Contents

Reviews

Praise for Tyler Stallings ""A deft magician moving effortlessly between the parallel worlds of curator, artist, and writer, the enigmatic Stallings ... sees creating, organizing, and writing about art as one in the same project."" —Aimee Greenberg ""With an inquisitive eye for popular culture, [Stallings's] shows are intelligent without being academic; ambitious without being haughty; and playful, when appropriate, without being flippant."" —Holly Myers, LA Weekly ""Among Stallings’s more memorable exhibitions were those devoted to skateboard culture aesthetics and the overlaps between art and extraterrestrial enthusiasts… Artist/curator Tyler Stallings can be found today wherever the rest of the art world will be looking for a pulse tomorrow.” —Christopher Miles, Flaunt

Author Information

Tyler Stallings is a writer, curator, and filmmaker based in Southern California. With a focus on contemporary art and speculative fiction, he has curated exhibitions and edited books exploring themes of identity, technology, and cultural landscapes, including Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas. He is also the author of Aridtopia: Essays on Art & Culture from Deserts in the Southwest United States and co-editor of Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture. Naida Osline is a photographer and filmmaker whose work is built through long-term “collections” that explore how people shape, curate, and mythologize their environments. Her projects move between the intimate and the social—photographing psychoactive plants, desert shrubs, shoreline debris, and portraits of men on Colombian fincas, alongside participatory video storytelling such as Americans Tell Jokes and Gringotopia, and the feature-length documentary Hometown Proud, which explore humor, identity, and American self-representation. High School Reunion, her current film-in-progress, examines this broader cultural ritual and nostalgia as durable parts of American life and collective identity.

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