THE LONG HAUL - VENDIDO

Amanda Stern
Blauner Books Literary Agency
Soft Skull – October 2003, 142 pp.
www.softskull.com/index.php

Rights sold:
***Brasil - Editora Rocco***

Description:
In a milieu reminiscent of Buffalo 66 and Jesus Son, a college-aged alcoholic (“The Alcoholic”) and his codependent girlfriend (the unnamed protagonist) embark on a six-year ordeal that vaguely approximates a “relationship.” He is a small-town musician—a shiftless, disturbed, yet oddly gentle and pathetic figure. She is an on again-off again college student and free-clinic therapy patient, infatuated both by his broken state off stage and his Kurt Cobain-esque charisma on stage.

Pulled along by the fatal allure of lost causes, the two drive through an ice storm, kidnap an abandoned girl, and break into a house, making and breaking their promises all along the way. She gradually comes to understand that the hollowness inside them is something even fierce togetherness will not fill. As the redemption they hoped to find in each other turns to ruin, these two addicted youths find that extricating themselves from each other proves as difficult as breaking any self-destructive habit.

About the author:
Amanda Stern’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Swink, Venus Magazine, St. Ann’s Review, Salt Hill, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Spinning Jenny, Scriptum (Netherlands), Die Kroneitzung (Austria) and on Oxygen Media and NYToday.com, Forthcoming fiction will be included in a book by Found Magazine.
For several years she worked in independent film assisting Terry Gilliam, Hal Hartley, Ang Lee, Ted Hope and James Schamus. For two years she made her money as a professional comic co-hosting the Broadway Video/MSN venture celebrity talk show, "This is Not a Test" (featuring celebrity guests such as Conan O’Brien, the late Phil Hartman, Janeane Garofalo and Jon Stewart) at Catch A Rising Star, performing at Luna Lounge in New York City, on MTV and, for one year, as the on-air host for the unfortunately named Burly Bear Network on cable. For three years, Amanda created, hosted and produced The Cindy Something Show for Pseudo Online Network. She recently edited a found art narrative for The Talking Heads Box Set "Once In A Lifetime", which is in stores now. She is the curator and host of the Happy Ending Reading Series. The Long Haul (Soft Skull Press) her first novel is in stores nationwide. She was born and raised in Greenwich Village. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is at work on her next novel.

www.amandastern.com


Quotes:
“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." ~ Joanna Scott

“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

"Amanda Stern’s prose is spare and gorgeous. This tough little book is like an elegantly clad punch in the guts."
-Maggie Estep

"Elegant and spare, Amanda Stern’s daring first novel sparks the heart and ignites the imagination, introducing a bright new voice to the constellation of American Literature." --Melanie Rae Thon

"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, author of The Ecstatic and Slapboxing with Jesus

Reviews:
Nick Johnstone, UNCUT Magazine
“If you threw Denis Johnson’s "Jesus’ Son," Lou Reed’s "Berlin," Hubert Selby Jr’s "Requiem For A Dream," Claude Chabrol’s "Le Beau Serge," American Music Club’s "Everclear," Ellen Miller’s "Like Being Killed," Abel Ferrara’s "Bad Lieutenant," Leslie Schwartz’ "Jumping The Green" and Rick Moody’s "The Garden State" into a food mixer, you’d probably end up with something as beautiful and damaged as this debut novel from 33 year old New Yorker Amanda Stern. Over 144 pages, Stern chronicles the calamitous relationship between an alcoholic musician (known only as "The Alcoholic" and his troubled, co-dependent girlfriend (a nameless narrator throughout) via a cycle of short stories a la "Jesus’ Son." Anecdotal and elliptical, like Johnson, Stern employs vignettes to signpost the deterioration of the relationship, as"The Alcoholic" morphs from enigmatic party boy to suicidal drunk, dragging his girlfriend down with him through a syrup of break-ins, snowstorms, acid trips, seedy bars, flea-pit motels, fluffed gigs and hellish car rides. Reading Stern is like watching polaroids materialise, the horror creeping up on you. Picture perfect writing; a compelling story; emotions running over: in short, a great book about real life.”
-- Nick Johnstone

Publishers Weekly, Oct 20th
Stern’s slim debut, centered on the tumultuous six-year affair between a needy, self-absorbed young musician referred to only as "the Alcoholic," and the unnamed, enabling narrator, paints a rich picture of mid-1990s undergraduate and postcollege anomie. Details of the Gen-X experience-drinking at dive bars; going to rock shows attended by a "United Nations" of "fraternity brothers, sorority sisters, punks, skater kids, techno freaks"-are cleanly rendered, and Stern’s tone is a spot-on mix of nostalgia, sympathy and ennui. The story begins with the Alcoholic, a locally successful musician, self-destructing on stage at the unnamed college he and the narrator attend in upstate New York, a victim of his own drunken melodrama. The narrator blames herself- as she will continue to do throughout the novel -convinced that her fib about a former love caused his meltdown. Her slow slide into a depression caused by the Alcoholic’s superficial, controlling love, and the Alcoholic’s overwhelming need for validation are the forces that drive the narrative. Juxtaposing the couple’s life upstate with their later days in New York City, Stern shows the dysfunctional relationship in its moments of light (the first blush of affection; an ill-conceived nighttime quest for a corkscrew) and darkness (fighting; a miscarriage; an attempted rape). Though the narrator is sometimes frustratingly passive, she is also articulate and skillful at telling her own sharp, dark coming-of-age story.