Soft Skull Press | 71 Bond Street | Brooklyn, NY 11217 | 718.643.1599 | 718.643.0879 The Long Haul Amanda Stern 1-932360-06-9 144pp Trade Paperback Original Fiction/Literature October 2003 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. --Joanna Scott The Long Haul is the story of a frozen and rutted relationship between a college-age 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 in a milieu reminiscent of Buffalo 66 and Jesus Son. The Alcoholic is a small-town musician--a shiftless, disturbed yet oddly gentle and pathetic figure; he demands fealty and gets it, in spades, 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 Kurt Cobainesque 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 in her daily life, 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 a neglected girl, break into a house, make and break the same promises, uncover the futile existence of lost causes, forsake their own needs-- but not even an attempted rape on the ground of a prestigious liberal arts college is enough to make her flee. Instead they turn to New York City. As the redemption each finds in the other turns to ruin, these two addicted youths find that extricating themselves from the other is not as easy as sacrifice. Amanda Stern's prose is spare and gorgeous. This tough little book is like an elegantly clad punch in the guts. --Maggie Estep, author of Hex 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, filmmaker 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 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, and Ang Lee. She was born and raised in Greenwich Village, where she still lives. 25 city author tour; advertising in Bust, Bitch, Moxie, Skirt Agent: Andrew Blauner For more information about Amanda and The Long Haul, contact Richard Nash at Soft Skull Press.