Ted Sanders

• Winner of the 2011 Bakeless Prize for Fiction

• Available now from Graywolf Press

“Some of the animals are real; others are conjured up by characters, often as an outlet for impulses of anguish and desperation that they cannot otherwise express. The fanciful menagerie is given substance by the beauty of Sanders’s descriptions.”
— The New Yorker

“Ted Sanders is a supple and penetrating writer, and his collection is an accomplished debut.”
— ForeWord Reviews

“These stories have a blissfully clinical precision, redolent of David Foster Wallace.”
— Village Voice

“In the voice of a human, Sanders covers all of the rollercoasterìng realms of existence–closeness can be felt at one moment, alienation at others. Or maybe Sanders is beckoning as a nonhuman, an animal that can still be understood by its emotional range and attention to detail. No matter where it comes from, his is a gut-wrenching and wild and tender song.”
— Rain Taxi

“Through fresh prose that is emotional and dispassionate at once, [Sanders] has done something great in No Animals We Could Name, creating a complex work that speaks to the oddity of modern life.”
— Zyzzyva

“The history of these characters is no more than hinted at and the future is uncertain. All that is left is the moment, carefully cut from the surrounding rock and polished to a shine.”
— Bookslut

“Curiosity and sexuality blend into something unsettling for both narrator and reader.”
— TimeOut Chicago

“In pushing perspective to the extreme as he does here, he offers an outsize version of what he does so well, so subtly and so consistently…He makes us see everything anew.”
— Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“The stories in Ted Sanders’ varied, fascinating collection…take on their own such awareness, teaching the reader to read their intricate language.”
— Full Stop

“In Sanders’s formally rigorous debut…all 12 [stories] are memorable, and such a broad range in a story collection is welcome.”
— Publishers Weekly

“This is a hard, striking, quicksilvery book, something richer than most of us (I’m guessing) will realize even after we’ve made our way through it—the thing’s gonna be sitting on your shelf seething for years.”
— Corduroy Books

“It is impossible to adequately describe Ted Sanders’s new short story collection, No Animals We Could Name, a book about all sorts of sea life and obituaries and dwarfism and a party so monumentally bad it has to be told in three parts. Is the book brilliant? It is. Is it weird? It is. Does it suggest that its author is so talented that he can do pretty much anything he wants, a writer equally expert at tragedy and comedy, realism and surrealism? It does. But still, none of this quite does this remarkable book justice. Let’s just say that I’ve never read another book like it.”
— Brock Clarke, author of Exley

“The stories in No Animals We Could Name do surprising and innovative things with the short story form, while at the same time they are richly moving and full of emotional depth. Ted Sanders is one of a kind, and this book puts him at the forefront of young writers who are breathing new, fresh life into the short story genre. It’s a truly exciting and wonderful book that I can’t recommend highly enough.”
— Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake and Await Your Reply

“This is the music I have been waiting for, which is to say: the music made by the intersection of the visual, the sonic, the emotional, the tactile, the dramatic, and the gonzo. Ted Sanders is a fearless, wild, tremendously sensitive writer, who seems to write not only about the three dimensions of the world we live in, but also about the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth. . .  Reading these stories is like looking into the eyes of an animal, finding there both recognition and unbridled otherness, a gaze returned to you that both is and isn’t from a reality you already know and that may be ringed with fur, or legs.”
— Stacey D’Erasmo, Bakeless Prize judge

“Think you know what word, a sentence, a human experience can be? Read this collection. It will grow new nerve endings on your fingertips, new tints on your color palette, new chambers in your heart.”
— Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium

“No Animals We Could Name is that spectacular rarity, a debut collection that shows range and versatility without ever seeming lost in them. Sanders assays a variety of tones and narrative modes, and in every one seems utterly assured. The book is unified and held together by a calm, perceptive, playful—and to me irresistible—sensibility. But the most striking thing about the stories here is the empathetic alertness to the natural world, human and animal, that informs and underlies every one of them. Ted Sanders by God pays attention, and oh, how it pays back. This looks like the start of a fantastic career.”
— Michael Griffith, author of Trophy