978-0-9904012-7-8
Pub Date: December 2014
Author: Sonia Pilcer
It’s the late 1970s. Aging sirens, dreamers, eccentrics and connivers live in a small residential hotel on the Upper West Side. Their tiny suites, separated by cracked plaster walls, are paved with golden stories, woven together in this novel of funny, intimate moments between neighbors. The Last Hotel reminds us of how New York was once a grittier, poorer city, full of warmth and character. It’s captured here with the same perfect pitch that has informed Sonia Pilcer’s previous work, which the New York Times described as “tough and sweet… touchingly truthful.”
“Love this novel! Just wonderful! I have been lamenting how much more fun NYC was for me in the early ’80s when I first moved here, and The Last Hotel just brought it all back.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Cruel Beautiful World
“Sonia Pilcer writes with wit and deep tenderness as she precisely evokes the vanished world of a small West Side residential hotel filled with zany eccentrics and lost souls. You will laugh and you will feel your throat catch with hurt, but you will be absorbed throughout.”
—Joseph Berger
“Bittersweet, funny. Human and humane. A movie surely waits.”
—Anne Roiphe, author of Up the Sandbox
“The Last Hotel is a 20th Century ark filled with survivors of history and gentrification. Sonia Pilcer brings them all vividly to life with gentle wit and a generous heart.”
—Hilma Wolitzer, author of An Available Man
Sonia Pilcer was born in Augsburg, Germany and raised in the boroughs of New York City. Her latest book The Last Hotel: A Novel in Suites is based on the residential hotel her father managed on the Upper Westside in the '70s.
Teen Angel, her first novel, launched Pilcer's career in her twenties. It was bought by Universal Studios and she wrote the screenplay with Garry Marshall. The book has recently been reissued in a 35th Year Anniversary Edition. Her other novels include Maiden Rites, Little Darlings, and I-LAND: Manhattan Monologues. Her adaptation of I-LAND played at the Thirteenth Street Repertory Theater for six years. Most recently, The Holocaust Kid, her deepest and most personal book, explored the meaning of being '2G', a Second Generation Holocaust survivor. Her theatrical adaptation was staged at Shakespeare & Co in Lenox, Mass.
Sonia teaches at Berkshire Community College and the Writers Voice in New York City, as well as privately. 
