“In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.”

American fiction writer

Laura van den Berg is an American fiction writer, known for five works of fiction. Her first two collections of short stories were both shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, in 2010 and 2014. Her work has drawn recognition from major literary institutions. In 2021, she received the Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.