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See the video Brad Beenders made for DOC HOLIDAYS, a song from the NORTHLINE soundtrack. This version features Willy reading an excerpt from the novel NORTHLINE.
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We are thrilled to annonce that Courtney Hunt just signed on to write and direct the film version of NORTHLINE! Her film Frozen River won the grand jury prize at Sundance. Jeff Sharp of Sharp Independent will produce the film.
read more here
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Willy Vlautin and The Motel Life are finalists for the Oregon Book Awards! Willy is one of five finalists up for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. Read more here.

Read an interview with Chuck Palahniuk and Willy Vlautin click here

To hear the title track of NORTHLINE please go to the links page or click here

BOOKLIST
Timorous, twentysomething Allison Johnson is pregnant. She didn’t complete high school and has worked as a waitress for several years. She often gets drunk and quickly passes out and then writes herself letters that shriek her lack of worth. But her biggest fear is of Jimmy Bodie, her abusive, budding-skinhead boyfriend. So she leaves Las Vegas and moves to Reno. She gives her son up for adoption, begins waitressing again, and has imaginary conversations with actor Paul Newman that help her carry on. Vlautin uses the same strikingly spare and simple prose in Northline that distinguised his critically acclaimed first novel, The Motel Life (2007). His essential subject, decent people enduring difficult lives, also remains the same, but here he takes a giant step in his growth as a novelist, plumbing much deeper into the emotional core of his characters. Northline recalls a dust-jacket blurb on an early edition of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: “Two hours to read, 20 years to forget.” —Thomas Gaughan

KIRKUS REVIEW
An unflinching look at people living on the edge in Vegas and Reno.
Vlautin (The Motel Life, 2007) turns his frighteningly unsentimental gaze on those drifting through life, spending much of their time with Budweiser and Jim Beam, and (occasionally) trying to find a modestly higher purpose. The central figure is Allison Johnson, whose self-esteem is lower than the elevation of the desert that surrounds her. Her boyfriend, Jimmy Bodie, is sympathetic with the skinheads and in a spasm of collective drunkenness has a swastika tattooed on Allison’s back. After numerous abuses—including being locked in the trunk of his car and handcuffed to a bed for ten hours—she’s had enough. She heads to Reno alone to have Jimmy’s baby and to escape him once and for all. After giving up her infant son for adoption, she starts to get her life together. She works as a waitress at the Cal Neva Top Deck restaurant, the graveyard shift so she has fewer human interactions to deal with. Allison’s self-image remains fragile, so much so that every so often she summons up a fantasy image of Paul Newman, who encourages her to better herself. At first Allison is a rather unattractive character—hard-drinking and pathologically timid—but eventually her fragility and vulnerability make her more sympathetic. She takes a second job as a telephone solicitor for Curt vacuum cleaners, and she even begins to date Dan Mahony, a similarly scarred (and scared) outsider, a regular customer at the Top Deck who like Allison rarely ventures outside his sphere of the familiar. Vlautin’s literary style either consciously or unconsciously echoes that of Hemingway (“They walked there in silence and she ordered a cup of coffee. He ordered a donut and coffee, and they sat at the counter.”), and it offers a simplicity of diction that conveys limited realities. By the end of the novel Allison moves tentatively toward transcending her original lot in life. Spare and strangely moving.

‘The Motel Life was staggeringly good ... He now follows it with the equally brilliant Northline which like its predecessor recalls the grim beauty of something like Denis Johnson's Angels or Jesus' son - a heartbreaking trip. ***** Uncut

‘Vlautin follows his excellent first novel The Motel Life with a raw tale of America's underclass ... the cool clarity of Vlautin's simple prose, perfectly listened-to dialogue and unsentimental realism hold reader gloom at bay. The accompanying CD by Vlautin and his band's pedal/lap steel man Paul Brainard is a discreet sequence of instrumentals. All round Willy Vlautin is becoming one of America's most fundamental artists in words and music.’ Mojo

'What makes it exceptional is the vividness with which Vlautin
colours [Alison's] world and his skill in plotting her journey ... he is
mining a lost seam of American writing that celebrates the dispossessed,
beginning with Caldwell and Steinbeck, continuing with Algren and
Fante.' John Williams, Independent

'The devil is not so much in the detail, as in the character and
the mood, and here Vlautin is really impressive. His writing is resonant
and economic and full of compassion.' Daily Telegraph click here for full review

'The most beautiful and satisfying book of '08 so far.' Peter Wild, Bookmunch   click here for full review

‘This is a heartfelt, dispairing novel ... there is a tenderness of execution and brief promise of flawed redemption, without which no C&W ballad would be complete. Themusicality is not an accident: the novel comes with a low-key alt country CD, a perfect accompaniment t quietly hopeless, never-ending horror of poor America.’ Financial Times

‘Sparse and brital, but ultimately resemptive, this is compelling stuff.’ Big Issue Scotland

‘A compassionate look at everyday, ordinary people struggling to make a new life for themselves in America ... Comes complete with its own soundtrack of elegiac, rootsy music by the author.’ Herald

‘Halfway between a Sam Shepard play and a Willie Nelson song, the language is spare, simple and beautifully hewn, and if there's only a flicker of redemption, it shines all the brighter in the gloom. Not least among the book's charms is the accompanying CD, a lovely desert sunset story-soundtrack.’ Hot Press

‘Vlautin's writing style pares everything down to an absolute minimum, so there is almost no fat or excess in any sentence, paragraph or chapter. It is an art that you wish many other authors could achieve. That, coupled with his character-driven realism, means that he is an author worth discovering and this is a novel well worth reading.’ Morning Star

‘Giving dirty realism a country twang that tugs at the heartstrings, Richmond Fontaine singer Willy Vlautin follows 2006's The Motel Life with a novel that has the spare, devastating clarity and profundity of Raymond Carver ... Allison is the kind of loser who gets routinely written off but, in Vlautin's compassionate hands, her bitter losses and fragile hopes are the stuff of quietly resonant drama.
An accompanying CD by Vlautin and Paul Brainard offers tunes as hauntingly melancholic as the book.’ **** Metro

‘Northline is an honest, compassionate story that deals, with grace and respect, with the lives of American losers ... In some ways, it's an archetypal tale: a poor girl stumbling towards the light. What makes it exceptional is the vividness with which Vlautin colours her world and his skill in plotting her journey ... Vlautin is mining a lost seam of American writing that celebrates the dispossessed, beginning with Caldwell and Steinbeck, continuing with Algren and Fante. These are the great writers who stand behind his fiction, just as Hank Williams and Bruce Springsteen stand behind the music of Richmond Fontaine.’ Independent

THE OBSERVER (interview) click here

The Oregonian named THE MOTEL LIFE one of the top five best Northwest novels of 2007.
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THE MOTEL LIFE made the cut for The Washington Post's "25 Best Books of 2007"!
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Portland's Willamette Week named THE MOTEL LIFE one of their top five favorite books of 2007.
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