I'm pleased to let you know that Amanda is headed your way as part of her cross-country road trip tour next month. She's driving from New York City to California and back again in the company of a complete stranger she met on the Internet and a documentary filmmaker.

As a native New Yorker, Amanda never learned to drive...until now! She's taken (and not quite passed)***

(UPDATE: she finally PASSED) her driving test twice in the last few weeks. Here's hoping the third time's a charm! (IT WAS!) For more info on Amanda's Tour Companion Contest (including the hilarious application cited in PW and in Canada's Ottawa Citizen), the Ugly Teen Photo Contest, and Amanda's Driving School Updates, check out http://www.amandastern.com.

Also, the Ottawa Citizen just ran their second piece about Amanda's unique book tour, titled, Driving Ambition. The first piece was called, "Driving Miss Crazy"

Here's the tour schedule for your area. Amanda is available for additional drop-in book signings, impromptu readings, and she has free LONG HAUL bookmarks for your stores. If you're anywhere along this route, just let us know where and when you want her!

NEW YORK, NY October 21 at 7 p.m. Lenox Hill Bookstore

October 23 at 7 p.m. Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe with Maggie Estep & Nelly Reifler

October 24th @ 9:40AM !!! (ouch) The Nightingale Bamford School Upper School Assembly (with Nelly Reifler)

October 27th Long Haul Launch Party

October 28 at 7:30 pm Barnes & Noble Park Slope, Brooklyn with Andrew Lewis Conn (author, P)

CLEVELAND, CHICAGO, ETC.

CSU, Cuyahoga Community College, Roosevelt University, and more!

October 29-November 1 Stay tuned for more info! MADISON, WI

November 2 at 12 p.m. Canterbury Booksellers SEATTLE, WA

November 7 at 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Bookstore PORTLAND, OR

November 8 at 8 p.m. Reading Frenzy LODI, CA (near SACRAMENTO)

November 9 at 2 p.m. Lodi Public Library BERKELEY, CA

November 10 or Tuesday, November 11 DROP-IN BOOK SIGNING Berkeley Barnes & Noble Details to come

November 10 or Tuesday, November 11 DROP-IN BOOK SIGNING CODY'S BOOKSTORE SAN FRANCISCO, CA

November 11 at 7 p.m. City Lights Bookstore

TUCSON, ALBUQUERQUE, and more

Pending. Stay tuned for details.

AUSTIN, TX

November 15 at 8:00 p.m. Escapist Books Party for Amanda with Neal Pollack! NASHVILLE, TN

November 19 Watkins College of Art and Design GAINESVILLE, GA

November 20 at 4 p.m. Brenau College Library

ATHENS, GA

Friday, November 21 T'aint No Sin Reading Series with Danielle Pafunda X-Ray Cafe RICHMOND, VA

November 21 (or 22-TBD) Chop Suey Books DEEP RIVER, CT

December 4 at 7:30 Deep River Public Library

Back in NEW YORK

December 6-7 Emily Dickinson Marathon Reading Bowery Poetry Club

December 8 Junno's with Hannah Tinti

And JANUARY on the EAST COAST with HAL SIROWITZ

Stops include Philadelphia, Rochester, Washington, Portland ME, Boston, Providence, and more!

PRAISE FOR THE LONG HAUL BY AMANDA STERN
Publishers Weekly: "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, [which] 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."

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review: "Amanda Stern's first novel, The Long Haul, opens with the Alcoholic, a college musician, setting up to play to an eager gathering of fans that includes his new girlfriend, poised to hear him dedicate a song to her. The audience, the Alcoholic, the girlfriend: Each is held captive by anticipation. The mood of the first scene clings to the rest of this short, tight story: the high expectations and arrested hopes of a youthful relationship. Their love story--its many false starts, poor choices and deeply felt agonies--has all the childishness of young adults but a certain childlike wisdom as well. The girlfriend narrator, who remains nameless, alternates between genuine despair and a punk-pose detachment, encountering adult problems with a teenager's willful shortsightedness. This moody novel is about dependency and inaction, but it is told with brave, risky language. Much of the time this pays off with metaphors that are so fresh they are almost jarring; they deliver the shock of unexpected truth. Of a rival, the girlfriend says, 'She is nothing, a plastic disposable key chain,' infusing the most banal clutter of modern life with new meaning. Other images are both sweetly innocent and emotionally blunt, as when she says, 'My chest opens like a drawer when he passes' or 'the snow falls to the ground like a haircut.' In one virtuoso stunt, Stern plays an ironic riff on AA-speech, rhythmically punching at the vacuity of slogans like 'alcohol-ism not alcohol-wasm.' But there are some missteps, too, a few so strange they make you want to groan ("She is . . . carrying not only their child, but also their baggage") or laugh aloud ("The temperature is falling fast like a dead bird off a tree"). Yet Stern writes with an open heart that is fearless enough to make even failures seem admirable; her willingness to experiment is a lesson for novelists and readers both."

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.

Liz Spikol, Philadelphia Weekly: "I read [The Long Haul] as I walk to and from work, up and down stairs, when I get home and before I go to bed. I have to know: Will she marry him? Will he go to A.A.? Will he stop washing his hair with conditioner instead of shampoo?"

Las Vegas Weekly: "Another tiny publisher of note is Soft Skull Press, whose upcoming title The Long Haul, by Amanda Stern, has earned the author comparisons to Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)."

Joanna Scott: "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 work that is startling, wrenching, beautiful, and powerfully resonant."

Hal Hartley: "Amanda Stern has rendered a powerful impression of confusion, ambivalence, regret, rage and occasional bliss with an exactitude that is, itself, funny and endearing."

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

-- Richard Nash
Publisher
Soft Skull Press
71 Bond Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(718) 643-1599
http://www.softskull.com