What is Greg Sanders reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Greg Sanders, author of Motel Girl, a collection of 21 short stories.

His entry begins:

About a month ago a writer friend, David Pollock, loaned me his copy of Thomas Bernhard's novel, The Loser. The story, in first person, follows the unnamed narrator's fictional relationship with the piano playing genius Glenn Gould and a second friend, Wertheimer, whom Gould labels with "The Loser" moniker when the three men are in music school together in the 1950s. Structurally, the third paragraph, which begins on the first page of the novel, goes on to the end of the book, and the entire narrative is an internal monologue. The novel's very bleak in its way (one suicide and lots of talk of death and diminution), but the narrator's disdain for his fellow Austrians—he calls them "cretinous"—and his meditations on the ridiculous delicacy of artists' egos (in this case, he and Wertheimer become convinced of their worthlessness the very fist time they hear Gould play the piano), along with his analysis of the interrelationship between wealth and existential unhappiness (the latter is a luxury only the former can afford) kept me, paradoxically, happy as all get up. The pure bleakness of the novel....[read on]

Greg Sanders' short stories have appeared in a number of journals and magazines, including Mississippi Review, Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, Essays & Fictions, The Los Angeles Review, and The Warwick Review. He earned his MFA from the New School in 2004, lives in New York City, and earns his living as a technical writer.

Among the praise for Motel Girl:

"Greg Sanders has hit the bullseye with Motel Girl. The stories—original, often surreal, yet thoroughly convincing—are tone-perfect, exuding a marvelous, full-bodied authority. An astonishingly fine debut."
—Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black

"Greg Sanders's stories are ingenious and original—but more important, he's a fabulist with a heart."
—David Gates, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Wonders of the Invisible World, Jernigan and Preston Falls.

Learn more about Greg Sanders and his writing at his website, MySpace page, and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Greg Sanders.

--Marshal Zeringue