All Day Is a Long Time

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. He tries crack cocaine for the first time and is 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 the odds, to carve out a place for hope. David Sanchez's debut resounds with real force and demonstrates the redemptive power of the written word.

This book has it all . . . 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 ofWe The Animals (October 2021)

David Sanchez has poured all of himself into this debut, a terrifying, moving and profound exploration of the liminal space between addiction and connection.

-- KAREN RUSSELL, author of Swamplandia! (October 2021)

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 (October 2021)

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 beautiful poem of a book.

-- NICK FLYNN, author of The Reenactments and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (October 2021)

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's hero looks the devil in the eye and returns to tell a death-defying tale of redemption.

-- CHRIS RUSH, author The Light Years (October 2021)

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 GARCIA, author of Dreaming in Cuban (October 2021)

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.

-- GARRARD CONLEY, author of Boy Erased (October 2021)
This exceptional debut is not a cautionary tale about the perils of drugs, but it certainly is the story of so many people right now, and it somehow leaves us with hope. What's more, the rare if dark gems found along its ocean floors, all sharp and brittle and made of base desire, let us glean a part of what's at the heart of addiction itself. -- Tommy Orange New York Times
A semi-autobiographical novel of trauma and addiction offers hope for narrator, author and reader...This is raw, semi-autobiographical fiction at its most painfully honest... in David's quieter moments, when Sanchez's writing has a fine, almost hallucinatory quality, it's also a thought-provoking portrait of the vulnerability present in family life and how easily that can turn into damage... Literature has saved him. The Observer

David Sanchez is the recipient of 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, Florida. All Day Is A Long Time is his first novel.

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. He tries crack cocaine for the first time and is 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 the odds, to carve out a place for hope. David Sanchez's debut resounds with real force and demonstrates the redemptive power of the written word.

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