Have you ever walked into a hotel room and wondered who stayed there through the years and what took place before you entered? In her debut short story collection, Merle Saferstein captures the essence of the famed Hollywood Beach Hotel and brings to life the characters that have crossed the threshold of Room 732. Set against the backdrop of Florida's Atlantic Ocean, Room 732 reflects the hotel's transformation from an elegant getaway during the '20s and '30s to a U. S. Navy training and indoctrination center during World War II. After the war, the upscale hotel re-opened. Then, in 1971, Florida Bible College moved in, followed by timeshares and condos. More recently, the ever-changing edifice was restored to the vacation resort it was originally intended to be. Woven through intimate letters, journal entries, and private conversations, each story explores the threads of connection, communication, and life experiences and echoes the culture of the times. Breathing life into the walls of Room 732, the characters experience a range of emotions as they live with the effects of war, the joy of discovering faith, the death of a loved one, the challenges of marriage, and the intimacy in relationships.You will meet two strangers who become friends, a seasoned Naval officer who is preparing sailors for war, and a young married woman who explores her innermost thoughts. You also will encounter a divorced father who is spending time with his daughter after a long absence, two cousins who have come to the hotel on a special mission, and many other individuals who have stories to tell.

More than any other major American author, Don DeLillo has examined the manner in which contemporary American consciousness has been shaped by the historically unique incursion into daily life of information, military, and consumer technologies. In DeLillo's fictions, technological apparatuses are not merely set-pieces in the characters' environments, nor merely tools to move the plot along, they are sites of mystery and magic, whirlpools of space-time, and convex mirrors of identity. Television sets, filmic images, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers, and nuclear bombs are not simply objects in the world for DeLillo's characters; they are psychological phenomena that shape the possibilities for action, influence the nature of perception, and incorporate themselves into the fabric of memory and identity. DeLillo is a phenomenologist of the contemporary technoscape and an ecologist of our new kind of natural habitat. Through a close reading of four DeLillo novels, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels examines the variety of modes in which DeLillo's fictions illustrate the technologically mediated confluence of his human subjects and the field of cultural objects in which they discover themselves. The model of interactionism between human beings and technological instruments that is implicit in DeLillo's writing suggests significant applications both to the study of other contemporary novelists as well as to contemporary cultural studies.

Have you ever walked into a hotel room and wondered who stayed there through the years and what took place before you entered? In her debut short story collection, Merle Saferstein captures the essence of the famed Hollywood Beach Hotel and brings to life the characters that have crossed the threshold of Room 732.Set against the backdrop of Florida's Atlantic Ocean, Room 732 reflects the hotel's transformation from an elegant getaway during the '20s and '30s to a U. S. Navy training and indoctrination center during World War II. After the war, the upscale hotel re-opened. Then, in 1971, Florida Bible College moved in, followed by timeshares and condos. More recently, the ever-changing edifice was restored to the vacation resort it was originally intended to be.Woven through intimate letters, journal entries, and private conversations, each story explores the threads of connection, communication, and life experiences and echoes the culture of the times. Breathing life into the walls of Room 732, the characters experience a range of emotions as they live with the effects of war, the joy of discovering faith, the death of a loved one, the challenges of marriage, and the intimacy in relationships.You will meet two strangers who become friends, a seasoned Naval officer who is preparing sailors for war, and a young married woman who explores her innermost thoughts. You also will encounter a divorced father who is spending time with his daughter after a long absence, two cousins who have come to the hotel on a special mission, and many other individuals who have stories to tell.