In the center of the rural boomtown of Soda Springs, Idaho, stands the historic Enders Hotel, Café, and Bar, a three-story brick building that has been many things to many people. But to one family who bought it as an attempt to renew themselves it was home, a place they desperately tried to hold on to and yet, after seventeen years of living there, the very place from which they wanted to escape.

 

Growing up under its leaking roof, Brandon R. Schrand watched a cast of broken characters pass through the hotel doors—an alcoholic artist, a forgotten boxing champ, an ex-con, a homeless family—and tried to find his own identity among those revolving faces. Haunted by a father he had never seen, he tested the faces of those drifters for familiarity. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, The Enders Hotel reveals the promises and warnings of western boomtown life—stories of alcoholism, murder, betrayal, hope, and finally, redemption.

Brandon R. Schrand is the coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. His work has appeared in such periodicals as The Utne Reader, Tin House, Green Mountains Review, Colorado Review, River Teeth, Ecotone, and other journals.

“Schrand’s deeply textured memoir of life in a small Idaho town boasts a rich palette of glittering iridescent hues, somber earth tones, and delicate, evocative washes. . . . Schrand’s memoir sings, stirring the senses as much as the soul.”—Whitney Scott, Booklist (starred review)

“For a young child, the hotel exerted a certain kind of magic, which Schrand effectively captures in his reminiscences. . . . An evocative account of a man coming to terms with his youth.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Gorgeously written and generous in its telling, Schrand’s memoir takes us deep into the heart of a boomtown gone bust and a family surviving on little more than stubbornness and a desire to do the next right thing. The Enders Hotel is a heartbroken love song to a time gone by, a place lost, and a people whose longings ring true long after the last page ends.”—Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country

“Brandon Schrand probes the secrets of the heart and the heartland in his magical new memoir, in which the old Enders Hotel is remembered as a boy’s paradise and the town of Soda Springs, Idaho, as a community where the broken and the down-and-out were given care and compassion.  Readers will remember The Enders Hotel for its fresh new depiction of a small town’s pain and its dignity as it endures through change, setbacks, and the perplexities of love.”—Mary Clearman Blew, author of All But the Waltz and Balsamroot

2008 Summer Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection

 

2007 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize winner