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Legends of the Chelsea Hotel

Living With Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca

Ed Hamilton

Thunder’s Mouth Press: 322 pp., $16.95 paper

“LEGENDS of the Chelsea Hotel” was born from a blog called “Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog,” created by Ed Hamilton, who has lived in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel for nearly 12 years, and his girlfriend. “Devoting your life to the arts often exacts a heavy toll in bitterness, disappointment, and failure,” Hamilton writes of the hotel’s quirky (at best) residents. “I wanted the book to be about this dark side of the creative dream. There’s a famous creative energy that pervades the Chelsea. You feel it when you walk through the door, and you never cease to feel it for as long as you live here.”

The Chelsea was built in 1883 and became a residence hotel in 1905. Thomas Wolfe wrote “You Can’t Go Home Again” in Room 831. (Hamilton and friends hold a bizarre seance to raise his spirit.) William S. Burroughs wrote “Naked Lunch” there. Dylan Thomas, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Russell, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Arthur Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Iggy Pop and Dee Dee Ramone all lived there, some a lot longer than others.

“Legends of the Chelsea Hotel” is a collection of bizarre tableaux -- aging actresses, bathroom high jinks, ghosts and tricksters. It is full of affection for a passing era. Surrounded by creeping gentrification, the Chelsea may not long remain affordable to the kinds of characters Hamilton describes.

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Emil and the Detectives

Erich Kastner, translated from the German by W. Martin with illustrations by Walter Trier

Overlook: 160 pp., $17.95

“EMIL and the Detectives” is “a little masterpiece,” writes Maurice Sendak in his introduction to this new translation of the children’s classic, written in 1929 by Erich Kastner, author of “Puss in Boots,” “The Flying Classroom” and “The Little Man and the Little Miss.” Sendak goes on: “It shows us the heroic nature of children, how they can stick together and accomplish wonders without the help of inept grownups.”

First, Kastner introduces the characters. There’s little Emil, of course -- so keenly aware of how hard his poor mother works “to put food on the table.” There’s the Man in the Bowler Hat: “Nobody knows him. . . . I’d like to urge you all to be on your guard around this guy. . . . Humans are fundamentally good, they say. And that may well be true. But you can’t make it too easy on them, those good humans.” And there’s Gus, the Boy With the Bicycle Horn: “[H]e has the best grades in gym. What else does he have? A pretty good heart and a bicycle horn.”

Emil is sent to visit his grandmother in Berlin. He takes the train alone, and his mother gives him spending money, for his ticket and especially for his grandmother. But while he’s sleeping, the money is stolen from his jacket pocket. Emil suspects the Man in the Bowler Hat. He jumps from the train and enlists the help of a gang of kids to help him retrieve his money.

There is something sweet and pure about Kastner’s writing, including his asides to the reader. “He was crying because of the money,” he writes of Emil’s response when he discovers the theft. “And he was crying because of his mother. And if you don’t understand why, no matter how tough you may think you are, then you’re beyond help.”

It’s hard to explain how completely this story seems of another time. The train, the bowler hat, the bicycle horn, the blue suit -- they could all be pieces in a delightful board game. Aunt Martha wants to know, at the end, if the story has a moral. “Of course it does,” says Emil’s grandmother. “Don’t send cash -- use traveler’s checks!”

Crawfish Mountain

A Novel

Ken Wells

Random House: 384 pp., $25.95

KEN WELLS may be less well known than fellow Southerner Carl Hiassen, but the marketing machine does a great disservice touting him as a Hiassen clone. Wells has a much greater feel for the landscape -- which is, in this novel and others, the Louisiana bayou -- and is much more evocative in his descriptions of it. This matters, especially in a novel about a piece of marsh, the ancestral home of the protagonist, Justin Pitre, left to him by his grandfather, an old swamp rat. When Texas oil baron Tom Huff decides he wants to build a pipeline through the marsh, Justin and his wife, Grace, refuse permission. The governor, who’s a spineless politician and a veteran skirt-chaser, falls in love with the glamorous environmentalist who opposes the project. And that’s only the beginning of Wells’ cast of characters.

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But it’s the ibis, the “rancid tide,” the coppery fish, the redfish court bouillon that steal the show: “[T]his land with its marshy expanses, its serpentine sloughs, its meandering and mystery-tinged hardwood swamps, a place both handsome and unusual for its prospect, wedged in the wildlife- and fish-rich mixing zone between the salt- and freshwater estuaries of one of the great wetlands of the world, a place where a person could catch redfish in the brackish bayous in the morning and black bass in tea-dark waters of a cypress cove in the afternoon.”

Now that’s a place you want to save.

So Much Nonsense

Edward Lear

Bodleian Library, Oxford: 128 pp, $25

IRRESISTIBLE! Edward Lear’s verse, his nonsense alphabets, his limericks, contain so much contagious life, humor and whimsy that a reader cannot be blamed for a sudden desire to stand on her head or sing and dance.

There was an Old Person of Spain,

Who hated all trouble and pain;

So he sat on a chair,

with his feet in the air,

That umbrageous Old Person of Spain.

And what of “The Kicking Kangaroo, who wore a Pale Pink Muslin dress / with Blue spots. . . .” This is a second chance at childhood, between covers -- the fountain of youth in book form.

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