Description: "A hugely compassionate, wildly original road movie of a novel." - Esquire "The same lost, struggling souls who inhabit Willy Vlautin's songs in the band Richmond Fontaine find themselves turning up in his critically acclaimed new novel, The Motel Life. Fans of Richmond Fontaine's somber alt-country rock will find the book to be a fleshed-out version of the themes Vlautin has written about for years--isolation, downward spirals, finding a small bit of temporary grace in an unforgiving world." - Denver Rocky Mountain News "I'm floored...This book feel so damn real, so powerful, so much like life, even if it's not yours." - Jonathan Zwickel, The Stranger "A natural for the bigscreen and in fact Babel and 21 Grams writer Guillermo Arriaga has bought the film rights..." - Salt Lake City Tribune "The furthest Vlautin's men can move is in circles, shackled to their dysfunctions and their meager paychecks..." - San Francisco Weekly "Sometimes I like to pretend Willy Vlautin invented me. Maybe that sounds weird. If you've ever heard his local country-punk band, Richmond Fontaine, you know the people Vlautin writes about tend to be pretty messed up. They're always broken down or lost or just flat-out at the end of their rope, whereas I've been a pretty lucky girl so far. But the reason I like to think he made me up is that if he did, then no matter what, no matter how many times I keep making the same mistakes, he would never give up on me. He'd hold out hope; he's like that." - Willamette Week "If there's any justice, anywhere, The Motel Life will be widely read and widely admired." - Booklist "A debut road-trip novel that echoes the spare, bleak style of such writers as Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver..." - Washington Post "Both heartbreaking and inspirational...written...with a simple hypnotic tone that seems as if it was grown in the Reno heat." - Associated Press ASAP "An unapologetic ode to self-defeat...Its charm is unassuming...at times its appeal is irresistible...It's a cliche to compare a novel to a story overheard in a bar, but 'The Motel Life' insists on the comparison. Willy Vlautin is the singer and songwriter for Richmond Fontaine, a band based in Portland, Oregon, and the music he makes is very much like his writing: mournful, understated and proudly steeped in menthol smoke and bourbon. Slighter than Carver, less puerile than Bukowski, Vlautin nevertheless manages to lay claim to the same bleary-eyed territory, and surprisingly--perhaps even unintentionally--to make it new." - New York Times Book Review "Slighter than Carver, less puerile than Bukowski, Vlautin...manages to lay claim to the same blearyeyed territory, and...to make it new." - New York Times Book Review, EDITOR'S CHOICE "A *very* fine novel. Writers of this quality--courageous, powerful, wonderfully compassionate--are rare, and need to be treasured." - John Burnside, author of The Dumbhouse "[A] serene and assured piece of minor-key Americana." - The Independent "Vlautin's coiled, poetically matter-of-fact prose calls to mind S.E.Hinton." - Publishers Weekly

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