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| Amanda Stern knows exactly how to keep us entangled and enthralled. She is a brilliantly precise writer, and in this first novel she puts the right words in the right place to create a novel that is startling, wrenching, beautiful, and powerfully resonant. |
| Amanda Stern's prose is spare and gorgeous. This tough little book is like an elegantly clad punch in the guts. —Maggie Estep |
| Amanda Stern has rendered a powerful impression of confusion, ambivalence, regret, rage, and occasional bliss with an exactitude that is, itself, funny, and endearing. —Hal Hartley |
| The Long Haul is a harrowing novel about the selfish parts of love. A woman gives herself wholeheartedly to a guy only to find out he's a worthless prick. What makes this novel special is that she renders the heartbreak with ease and grace. This touching story is less about the affair than a woman fighting to survive it. —Victor LaValle | |
The Long Haul
Amanda Stern
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| Paper | 5" x 7.5" | 152 pgs. | ISBN: 1-932360-06-9 | List: $12.00 | 10/1/2003 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: The Long Haul is about a frozen relationship between a college-aged alcoholic ("The Alcoholic") and his codependent girlfriend (the protagonist whose name is never spoken). Shifting between Upstate New York and New York City, the story follows the trajectory of their doomed six-year relationship.
The Alcoholic is a college-town musician—a shiftless, disturbed yet oddly gentle and pathetic figure, he demands fealty and receives it from his girlfriend, who sees no choice but to stick with him for "the long haul."
The protagonist, infatuated both by his irredeemably broken state off-stage and his Cobain-esque charisma on-stage, follows him everywhere. But she can barely apprehend the hollowness inside the two of them, fascinated instead by the trauma she encounters everywhere, an abandoned child, a pregnant junkie, a self-mutilating college friend…and in him.
In an effort to find their way in the world, they drive through an ice-storm, kidnap an abandoned girl, break into a house, make and break the same promises, uncover the futile existence of lost causes, and forsake their own needs. As the redemption they found in the other turns to ruin, these two addicted youths find that extricating themselves from the other is not as easy as sacrifice.
About the author: Amanda Stern’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, St. Ann's Review, Salt Hill, Spinning Jenny, Hayden's Ferry Review, Scriptum (Netherlands), Die Kroneitzung (Austria) and on Oxygen Media and NYToday.com.
For several years she worked in independent film, assisting and working for Terry Gilliam, Hal Hartley, Ted Hope, James Schamus and Ang Lee. Stern created "The Cindy Something Show," a radio comedy, broadcast live from the now defunct Pseudo Online Network. It ran for three years. She went on to co-host the celebrity comedy show, "This is Not a Test" a joint venture between Broadway Video and MSN, performed live on stage at Catch a Rising Star. The show featured celebrity guests such as Conan O'Brien, the late Phil Hartman, Janeane Garofalo and Jon Stewart. She has performed at Luna Lounge and on MTV.
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