Motel Girl: Reviews
The Los Angeles Times: Describing people, creating them from the ground up, is a slippery thing.
They don't stand still, like objects. Every fresh breeze, new thought, distant sound sets them trembling like leaves in the wind. Sanders has a way of fixing on a point, a detail (pimples, discolored teeth, tightly coiffed hair) and moving outward into the cosmos of human attributes; restlessness, a tendency to startle easily, ferocity. There is a kind of violence in every story, different kinds; and it is always surprising how the physical violence is the least disturbing kind.
Sanders' characters have a youthful ease of movement; they toss things and roll and jump and greet strangers easily. Once in orbit around other characters, however, they almost always fail to obey physical laws. "Open your mouth for my gun," says the girl at the front desk who has yet to grow into her true beauty. The man will be lucky if he gets out of there with all his teeth.
--Susan Salter Reynolds
Publishers Weekly: Realistic absurdity ties together the short stories of Sanders's intelligent and funny collection. Throughout, unsuspecting protagonists become entangled in bizarre (and yet vaguely believable) situations. There's Nadya, the Moscow-based freelance translator narrator of "Choco" who adopts a circus bear; Alan, who, in "Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude," visits an old college friend in the woods and discovers that rumors of a wandering robot might be true; and the anonymous insurance filer in "The Gallery" who finds a portal of rebirth triggered by an erotic sculpture. Between boring jobs and sexual depravity, it seems at first blush that the characters are doomed to unfulfilling, pitiful lives, but, upon closer inspection, it appears there may be something redeeming about them after all. Skillfully narrated and concisely written, this collection of short stories is at once comical, cringe-worthy, relevant and weird.
Rain Taxi Review of Books: Greg Sanders's prose will make you wake up and smell the latté, the Rioja, or maybe the gourmet cat food ("Hearty Halibut"). It's an especially rejuvenating discovery if your senses have been dulled by one too many short-story writers who just don't seem interested in language, or whose flat vocabulary appears to be dumbed down in service of their "ordinary" characters. Sanders's debut story collection Motel Girl inscribes its characters with rich inner lives and appealing texture.
Perhaps most refreshingly, the author isn't afraid of linguistic precision. We find ladybugs "lifting their spotted elytra and unfurling their membranous wings and flying into walls like tiny, drunken biplanes." Depending on the cut of the narrator, Sanders can move easily from sarcastic commentary to the clean lyricism of "the hill wept where springs broke through the rocky façade, marking their paths with algae and throwing tiny clouds of silt into the clear creek, like smoke." Like so many New York City writers, he too often resorts to the shorthand of landmarks and neighborhood names rather than describing, but when he does evoke those city settings, he gets it right—like the East Village "tenements whose fire escapes were once festooned with hand wrung garments drying in the sun instead of chrysanthemums, cat grass and bonsai gardens." A good ear for dialogue and a gift for canny metaphor add glitter and gleam.
Some stories in Motel Girl delve into speculative terrain: a tiny, tormenting imp narrates "Mr. Hallucinosis" and a crumbling doppelganger for the Guggenheim Museum has its own sci-fi properties in "The Gallery." Most of the stories visit the fantasies and fantastical oddities and intersections of human life. In "Garage Door," a man steals said door from his childhood home, hoping to find comfort or a touchstone by uncovering the hippy-dippy artwork of his youthful hand. Many revolve around shifting romantic and sexual relationships—sweetly wistful, mired in domestic quicksand, or tinged with violence or despair. In the thought-provoking title story, sexual daydreams lead to violence as the male narrator's lazy, casually degrading appraisal of a teenage girl is turned against him.
Sanders sharply renders characters, from actuaries to Frisbee-tossing college women, whose inner lives chafe against their outward behavior. Whether dramatic or meditative, these stories are deft, enigmatic lyrics that pivot on an image or insight. Tired of a diet of addiction memoirs? Curl up with this collection—"with soy milk but almost no foam"—to let the literary senses revive.
--Alicia L. Conroy
American Book Review: The stories in Greg Sanders’s debut collection are difficult to categorize. They owe a debt to Franz Kafka and fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges but seem just as strongly to want to transmit from a realist world where small psychological insights and gritty detail carry the day. The stories aspire to the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too achievement of existing in both literal and symbolic realms. Many of them reach this rare ground.... Read the entire review (PDF)
Time Out London: Motel Girl (Red Hen Press) is the debut collection of New York writer Greg Sanders. Like many debut collections it draws material from a decade of writing, going back to two stories originally published by Time Out Net Books in the early days of the magazine's online activities. 'Lemon', about a peep-show addict with a sick daughter, and 'The Sculptor', which addresses mortality with the help of an artist who makes pieces that explode once they've been looked at a certain number of times, are as fresh now as they were ten years ago. Sanders' stories are occasionally Kafkaesque (the narrator of 'I Am an Actuary' begins: 'People often ask me what actuaries do. I say that they entrench themselves in bunkers made of paper') and often evoke the same feelings as Edward Hopper's cityscapes--lonely lives led in sixth-floor walk-ups. He writes incisively about the fumbling attempts of men and women, either at home in Manhattan or out of their comfort zone in upstate New York, to connect meaningfully. His best stories, such as 'Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude', in which a couple's sex act is witnessed by the unlikeliest of onlookers, inject an element of the bizarre into the everyday. Buy online from the US, until a UK publisher wises up.
—Nicholas Royle
Shortlist: The stories in this New York-based writer's colourful collection capture the transcience of the city and characters that inhabit it. From drunks to demons to a vengeful motel clerk and a woman who must choose between her boyfriend and her live-in bear, Motel Girl is as surreal, exciting and absurd a human menagerie as the Big Apple itself. It's a strong debut from an important new writer with a glowing future.
Ramsey County (MN) Library Book Buzz: The characters in these short stories always seem to become embroiled in unusual and bizarre situations; the author has managed the very neat trick of making everything he writes absolutely believable and true-to-life. In the story “Choco,” A Moscow woman finds that her pet bear, adopted from a circus, causes complications in her love life; in another story, with the very descriptive title "Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude," the main character makes a startling discovery while visiting an old friend at a rural retreat. The other stories in the collection are also full of weird and wonderful people and events, and all of them are engaging, funny and full of astute observations about human behavior and foibles. If you like Tom Perrotta or David Sedaris, give this a try.
Meredith Sue Willis, Featured Small Press Books: Greg Sanders' Motel Girl, a first collection of short stories from Red Hen Press, sets up a slightly off-plumb world of sometimes-funny and sometimes anxious situations, often fraught with violence. The situation usually centers on a lonely guy, a bit of a loser, frequently living in the East Village. Some of the best stories are funny as well as sad, like “The Garage Door,” in which an unemployed suburban guy steals a garage door out of a quirky nostalgia for his childhood. In “At the Laundromat”a man finds an ad on the bulletin board and starts going to the therapist upstairs while his clothes spin. Other pieces are brilliantly, painfully dark, like the story of “L.,” whose girlfriend has left him during a New York City black-out. This story has a surprise ending that is amply earned. Another of my favorites is the title story, “Motel Girl,” an exploration of what rape would be like from a woman to a man. In all of the stories, there are surprises and a nicely astringent fictional experience.
They don't stand still, like objects. Every fresh breeze, new thought, distant sound sets them trembling like leaves in the wind. Sanders has a way of fixing on a point, a detail (pimples, discolored teeth, tightly coiffed hair) and moving outward into the cosmos of human attributes; restlessness, a tendency to startle easily, ferocity. There is a kind of violence in every story, different kinds; and it is always surprising how the physical violence is the least disturbing kind.
Sanders' characters have a youthful ease of movement; they toss things and roll and jump and greet strangers easily. Once in orbit around other characters, however, they almost always fail to obey physical laws. "Open your mouth for my gun," says the girl at the front desk who has yet to grow into her true beauty. The man will be lucky if he gets out of there with all his teeth.
--Susan Salter Reynolds
Publishers Weekly: Realistic absurdity ties together the short stories of Sanders's intelligent and funny collection. Throughout, unsuspecting protagonists become entangled in bizarre (and yet vaguely believable) situations. There's Nadya, the Moscow-based freelance translator narrator of "Choco" who adopts a circus bear; Alan, who, in "Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude," visits an old college friend in the woods and discovers that rumors of a wandering robot might be true; and the anonymous insurance filer in "The Gallery" who finds a portal of rebirth triggered by an erotic sculpture. Between boring jobs and sexual depravity, it seems at first blush that the characters are doomed to unfulfilling, pitiful lives, but, upon closer inspection, it appears there may be something redeeming about them after all. Skillfully narrated and concisely written, this collection of short stories is at once comical, cringe-worthy, relevant and weird.
Rain Taxi Review of Books: Greg Sanders's prose will make you wake up and smell the latté, the Rioja, or maybe the gourmet cat food ("Hearty Halibut"). It's an especially rejuvenating discovery if your senses have been dulled by one too many short-story writers who just don't seem interested in language, or whose flat vocabulary appears to be dumbed down in service of their "ordinary" characters. Sanders's debut story collection Motel Girl inscribes its characters with rich inner lives and appealing texture.
Perhaps most refreshingly, the author isn't afraid of linguistic precision. We find ladybugs "lifting their spotted elytra and unfurling their membranous wings and flying into walls like tiny, drunken biplanes." Depending on the cut of the narrator, Sanders can move easily from sarcastic commentary to the clean lyricism of "the hill wept where springs broke through the rocky façade, marking their paths with algae and throwing tiny clouds of silt into the clear creek, like smoke." Like so many New York City writers, he too often resorts to the shorthand of landmarks and neighborhood names rather than describing, but when he does evoke those city settings, he gets it right—like the East Village "tenements whose fire escapes were once festooned with hand wrung garments drying in the sun instead of chrysanthemums, cat grass and bonsai gardens." A good ear for dialogue and a gift for canny metaphor add glitter and gleam.
Some stories in Motel Girl delve into speculative terrain: a tiny, tormenting imp narrates "Mr. Hallucinosis" and a crumbling doppelganger for the Guggenheim Museum has its own sci-fi properties in "The Gallery." Most of the stories visit the fantasies and fantastical oddities and intersections of human life. In "Garage Door," a man steals said door from his childhood home, hoping to find comfort or a touchstone by uncovering the hippy-dippy artwork of his youthful hand. Many revolve around shifting romantic and sexual relationships—sweetly wistful, mired in domestic quicksand, or tinged with violence or despair. In the thought-provoking title story, sexual daydreams lead to violence as the male narrator's lazy, casually degrading appraisal of a teenage girl is turned against him.
Sanders sharply renders characters, from actuaries to Frisbee-tossing college women, whose inner lives chafe against their outward behavior. Whether dramatic or meditative, these stories are deft, enigmatic lyrics that pivot on an image or insight. Tired of a diet of addiction memoirs? Curl up with this collection—"with soy milk but almost no foam"—to let the literary senses revive.
--Alicia L. Conroy
American Book Review: The stories in Greg Sanders’s debut collection are difficult to categorize. They owe a debt to Franz Kafka and fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges but seem just as strongly to want to transmit from a realist world where small psychological insights and gritty detail carry the day. The stories aspire to the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too achievement of existing in both literal and symbolic realms. Many of them reach this rare ground.... Read the entire review (PDF)
Time Out London: Motel Girl (Red Hen Press) is the debut collection of New York writer Greg Sanders. Like many debut collections it draws material from a decade of writing, going back to two stories originally published by Time Out Net Books in the early days of the magazine's online activities. 'Lemon', about a peep-show addict with a sick daughter, and 'The Sculptor', which addresses mortality with the help of an artist who makes pieces that explode once they've been looked at a certain number of times, are as fresh now as they were ten years ago. Sanders' stories are occasionally Kafkaesque (the narrator of 'I Am an Actuary' begins: 'People often ask me what actuaries do. I say that they entrench themselves in bunkers made of paper') and often evoke the same feelings as Edward Hopper's cityscapes--lonely lives led in sixth-floor walk-ups. He writes incisively about the fumbling attempts of men and women, either at home in Manhattan or out of their comfort zone in upstate New York, to connect meaningfully. His best stories, such as 'Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude', in which a couple's sex act is witnessed by the unlikeliest of onlookers, inject an element of the bizarre into the everyday. Buy online from the US, until a UK publisher wises up.
—Nicholas Royle
Shortlist: The stories in this New York-based writer's colourful collection capture the transcience of the city and characters that inhabit it. From drunks to demons to a vengeful motel clerk and a woman who must choose between her boyfriend and her live-in bear, Motel Girl is as surreal, exciting and absurd a human menagerie as the Big Apple itself. It's a strong debut from an important new writer with a glowing future.
Ramsey County (MN) Library Book Buzz: The characters in these short stories always seem to become embroiled in unusual and bizarre situations; the author has managed the very neat trick of making everything he writes absolutely believable and true-to-life. In the story “Choco,” A Moscow woman finds that her pet bear, adopted from a circus, causes complications in her love life; in another story, with the very descriptive title "Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude," the main character makes a startling discovery while visiting an old friend at a rural retreat. The other stories in the collection are also full of weird and wonderful people and events, and all of them are engaging, funny and full of astute observations about human behavior and foibles. If you like Tom Perrotta or David Sedaris, give this a try.
Meredith Sue Willis, Featured Small Press Books: Greg Sanders' Motel Girl, a first collection of short stories from Red Hen Press, sets up a slightly off-plumb world of sometimes-funny and sometimes anxious situations, often fraught with violence. The situation usually centers on a lonely guy, a bit of a loser, frequently living in the East Village. Some of the best stories are funny as well as sad, like “The Garage Door,” in which an unemployed suburban guy steals a garage door out of a quirky nostalgia for his childhood. In “At the Laundromat”a man finds an ad on the bulletin board and starts going to the therapist upstairs while his clothes spin. Other pieces are brilliantly, painfully dark, like the story of “L.,” whose girlfriend has left him during a New York City black-out. This story has a surprise ending that is amply earned. Another of my favorites is the title story, “Motel Girl,” an exploration of what rape would be like from a woman to a man. In all of the stories, there are surprises and a nicely astringent fictional experience.