About the Book
David Sanchez's first novel--brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking--is the definitive handbook to hell and back . . . A stunning debut. --Cristina García, author of Dreaming in CubanFor fans of Denis Johnson and Ocean Vuong: A captivating, searing, and ultimately redemptive debut novel about coming of age on Florida's drug-riddled Gulf Coast and the enigmatic connection between memory and self David has a mind that never stops running. He reads Dante and Moby Dick, he sinks into Hemingway and battles with Milton. But on Florida's Gulf Coast, one can slip into deep water unconsciously; at the age of fourteen, David runs away from home to pursue a girl and, on his journey, tries crack cocaine for the first time. He's hooked instantly. Over the course of the next decade, he fights his way out of jail and rehab, trying to make sense of the world around him--a sunken world where faith in anything is a privilege. He makes his way to a tenuous sobriety, but it isn't until he takes a literature class at a community college that something within him ignites. All Day is a Long Time is a spectacular, raw account of growing up and managing, against every expectation, to carve out a place for hope. We see what it means, and what it takes, to come back from a place of little control--to map ourselves on the world around, and beyond, us. David Sanchez's debut resounds with real force and demonstrates the redemptive power of the written word.
About the Author :
DAVID SANCHEZ is the recipient of a James A. Michener Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of Miami, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, and a Tin House Scholarship in 2018. He lives in Tampa, FL. All Day Is a Long Time is his first novel.
Review :
"David Sanchez has poured all of himself into this debut, a terrifying, moving, and profound exploration of the liminal space between addiction and connection. He evokes the minute-to-minute suspense of early sobriety unlike anyone I've ever read, with an extraordinary honesty and poetry. Sanchez is a literary cartographer, mapping an intricate overlay of his young narrator's psychological states and Florida's real beaches and swamps, those coastlines in continuous revision." --Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove "This book has it all, not only does the harrowing story grip you from the start, but the voice is so insightful, so poetic, so absolutely alive to the world, that you won't be able to put it down. David Sanchez is a wonder, an important, essential new voice." --Justin Torres, author of We the Animals "With unflinching, razor-sharp precision, David Sanchez guides us through the labyrinthine heart of addiction and recovery. Wild, brutal, and tender, All Day is a Long Time is a novel of devastating truth and beauty." --Patricia Engel, author of Infinite Country and The Veins of the Ocean "David, the narrator of this harrowing tale, is like Quentin in The Sound and the Fury--"drawn to the past, sleepwalking into the future." To call this a novel of addiction would be like calling The Sound and the Fury a novel of regret--yes, each is that, but each is also so much more. This is a book about Florida--big and dumb and corrupt and magical. It is a book in which nothing happens, until terrible things happen. This book is a way for David to see the animals in his brain, a way to recede into that hazy spot, where, as Sanchez writes, "I both am and am not." In the end, somehow Faulkner saves him, somehow his mother's tears--tears he never understood--save him. Somehow each janky, random encounter saves him, gets him to the place--this place--where this book could be written. This beautiful poem of a book." --Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City "Sanchez is a daring, clever writer...This gritty and engrossing account of a man traversing into and out of hopelessness will stay with readers."--Publisher's Weekly "All Day is a Long Time is the most terrifying and beautiful exploration of how addiction is made. David Sanchez has written a gulf coast classic" --Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy "This journey into the mind of a young addict is like nothing I've ever read--a terrifying, and often ecstatic, struggle for survival. It's an obsessive world of chemical equations and philosophical conundrums, an attempt to reckon with a breathless descent into madness. Sanchez' hero looks the devil in the eye and returns to tell a death-defying tale of redemption." --Chris Rush, author The Light Years "David Sanchez's first novel--brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking--is the definitive handbook to hell and back. I haven't read anything as toughly vulnerable since Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. A stunning debut." --Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban "David Sanchez has written the rarest kind of novel. His subject matter, spanning so many aspects of contemporary American pain, is incredibly important, but it is his beautifully constructed sentences which make the narrative sing." &--No Source
