One of my favorite childhood memories is going to Kentucky to visit my grandmother’s hometown. We stayed in the same hotel during every trip: the Best Western. My mom loved it for its consistency and affordability. I loved the popcorn machine in the lobby and the indoor swimming pool.

Hotels are weird, with their anonymous, uniform rooms; where you have to give your name at the desk in order to sleep there. As writer Aaron Gilbreath finds out in “Three Feet by Six Feet by Three Feet,” hotels are, paradoxically, monuments to isolation and to community. Suzanne Joinson feels the weight of being everywhere and nowhere at once in “Hotel Melancholia.” These essays and the others stories in this list will take you all over the world, to the hotels we call our temporary homes.