“When Edmund White writes about Stephen Crane, it is the case of one American master turning his attention to another. The book is a marvel of the subtle layers of story-telling, and at every layer it is fascinating, tragic, and utterly beautiful.” - Ann Patchett
“Astonishing. As honest, daring and deeply felt as a work of the imagination can be. Hotel de Dream is not so much read as actively inhabited by the reader. It is a world one is saddened to leave.” - Gary Shteyngart
“Edmund White is one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language.” - Dave Eggers
“Vivid and powerful . . . [with] remarkable feats of stylistic impersonation, the language persuasive without seeming mannered . . . White deals elegantly with themes of literary influence, indebtedness, and impersonation.” - New York Times Book Review
“White illuminates Crane’s literary milieu, the urban gay subculture of his time, and the relationship of a writer’s experience to his fiction.” - The New Yorker
“The tale that Stephen dictates to Cora is entirely in the Crane mode, a brilliant pastiche of a writer dying yet not full-grown…but the title can be understood in another sense: This hotel of dreams is not the one in history; it’s within Edmund White, a heartbreak hotel where, in a dreamlike fugue of styles, gay life past and present commingle in the streets of a lost New York made of a thousand details still vivid in the imagination of a novelist – not Crane, but White himself.” - Washington Post Book World
In common parlance to say something is history is to say it’s dead and gone. But in the writing of Edmund White, one of our most interesting, serious, and mischievous writers, history could not be more animated: the places where past meets present, fact meets fiction, masculine meets feminine, comic meets tragic, and Henry James meets Stephen Crane are all his areas of literary expertise, sparked by an unsurpassed boldness of imagination. White’s cultural curiosity has always educated and startled. Here in Hotel de Dream it mesmerizes as well. - Lorrie Moore
“The environment of the city is evoked in such breathtaking language and with such flourishes of detail that it becomes a character in itself…the amount of research the author must have done to recreate a time and place from over a century ago is impressive, providing a believable backdrop into which White’s entertaining story has been seamlessly woven…It sheds light upon a queer community that necessarily lived in the shadows and that has gone largely unacknowledged until recently. There are important stories buried between the lines of mainstream history books, and White has imaginatively excavated one such story, and done so with wit, gusto, and ingenuity.” - Gay People's Chronicle
“White illuminates Crane’s literary milieu, the urban gay subculture of his time, and the relationship of a writer’s experience to his fiction...White presents a convincing version of how Crane…might have depicted a boy of the streets.” - The New Yorker