Ioannis Pappos

Ioannis Pappos's new novel is Hotel Living.

From his Q & A at Book Culture:

How did you come to write Hotel Living?

I wrote Hotel Living as a midlife crisis antidote. I was not planning to write a novel. I had not written anything before—except bullet points on PowerPoint while working in management consulting. During the last financial crisis I had to redefine myself, at least professionally for a bit, but that revealed bigger issues. I realized I had become a creature of habit; my momentum had turned into inertia in both work and fun, even in my relationships. So I traveled, but that didn’t bring a breakthrough. It was not until I ended up at my father’s village, in Greece, where I felt suddenly both very at home and reconnected with my family. For two decades I had barely seen them…the 2-3 weeks a year vacation that we tend to use in the US had not helped. A need to tell a story hit me, and I wrote the first draft of Hotel Living there. It is a recent-period fiction, a love story in the '00s, the decade that people partied hard, like in the roaring 1920s but woke up in the biggest depression of the 1930s…It is about hotel living, literally, during a time when some could afford it—"can always expense it..."—but also about hotel living as a state of mind: the lack of commitment or responsibilities, the constant floating-upwards caught in a wave of nonstop opportunities, of "nexting." And yet promotions and invites spark unhappiness and destruction; the main characters keep chasing the unavailable—“What if...[read on]

Visit Ioannis Pappos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue