“The occupants of Maya Sonenberg’s Blue Hotel have plenty to tell us. They tell us about the tingling awareness when sensation is heightened by love, they tell us about the brutality of romance. They us about childhood, motherhood, poverty, and privilege. They set photographs in motion. They amplify secrets. And they explain how they came to be telling their stories in the first place, layering richly detailed experiences with provocative inventions and making this collection essential reading for anyone interested in the art of fiction.”
Joanna Scott, MacArthur winner and author of Tourmaline, Various Antidotes, and Liberation

 “Voices from the Blue Hotel is a concept album, a whole much greater than the sum of its (superb) parts, a Bildungsroman-in-stories. Wanting what we don’t want becomes wanting what we do want. Depressed blue becomes sky blue, sexy blue. An impressively hard-won joy winds up animating this precise, beautiful, serious, and substantial book.”
David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

“About midway through Voices from the Blue Hotel, a writer-narrator tells us she has always dismissed the idea that the voices of characters come to writers as “too mystical, too irrational.” But our narrator, of course, is protesting so much because an utterly unlikely voice has thrust itself up her. “Why did this voice come to me,” our narrator wonders. This collection speculates about why we are made to tell the stories we do, when and to whom we tell them, why does a mother, near the end of her life, suddenly decide to tell her daughter about the boys she loved in youth? Why does a women tell her brother-in-law she’s in love with him? Or a woman tell her dead sister that she envies her? In this book, voices insist upon saying uncomfortable, difficult, profoundly human things. We ought to listen.”
Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body and American Romances

“Sonenberg’s emotionally charged narrators question, struggle, and seek as they negotiate between what they wish for and what they get, between whom they love and who loves them back. This follow-up to Cartographies (1989), winner of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, is an enchanting collection of ten stories, profound in a subtle way that sneaks up on the reader with ferocious effect….Sonenberg’s stories are both contemplative and rewarding.”
Leah Strauss, Booklist

Available through your local independent bookseller, or the usual places.