The guests include novelist Ernest Hemingway, journalist Martha Gellhorn, photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, press officer Arturo Barea, and his deputy, Ilsa Kulcsar. Vaill looks at the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of six eminent individuals staying at the Hotel Florida, a distinguished Madrid guesthouse. To these individuals, there is no better way to uncover the horrors of conflict and to record it for future generations than by experiencing it firsthand. Revolutionaries, writers, artists, and journalists flock to Madrid to make sense of the unfolding situation. The book begins in July 1936, just as war breaks out across the city. In Hotel Florida, Vaill looks at events that unfolded in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. She is a past fellow of the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She previously worked in publishing, and she served as the executive director of a non-profit company. A journalist, Vaill writes nonfiction and screenplays. Critics praise the book for exploring pre-WWII Europe and the Spanish Civil War from a new angle. In the cultural biography Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (2014), Amanda Vaill tells the story of six people whose lives are changed forever when they meet in Europe during the 1936 Spanish Civil War.

Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill