Fight for Your Long Day

IPPY gold award winner for best fiction in the Mid-Atlantic region In American pop culture, the handsome college professor is easy to spot. He’s endearingly neurotic, his unfinished novel usually stuffs an expensive mahogany desk, and female students sigh in his wake. And even if it’s not explicitly explained to us, the handsome college professor always has one other thing: tenure. But the further one moves down the academic totem pole, professors start to look very different. On the very bottom lies a less dashing, less financially secure, and altogether less noticed figure: the adjunct professor.

In Fight for Your Long Day, we meet Cyrus Duffleman – “Duffy” for short – an adjunct who can barely afford his two-room apartment. Forget about an unfinished novel: He’d be thrilled with health insurance. Still, he gamely shuffles to four urban universities each day to teach, and works a security guard graveyard shift once a week. Cobbled together, he can almost make a living.

But today, Duffy’s routine isn’t quite so predictable. The cryptic mumblings of a possibly psychotic student. A bow-and-arrow assassination. A small government protest, then, a very large and violent one. Lunch with a homeless woman who claims to have been a 1950s film star. Frenzied attempts to spare his sanity (and safety) – while a female coed quietly eyes him.

Part A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole), part Straight Man (Richard Russo), Fight for Your Long Day is a debut from a new literary talent. It will resonate with anyone who has ever known, been taught by, felt sorry for, or lived the life of an adjunct professor.

Praise for Fight for Your Long Day
“The marvelous debut is worthy of a place on the same bookshelf as Lucky Jim and A Confederacy of Dunces. The depiction of academic life had me both laughing and cringing at its accuracy. As in the best comic fiction, there is poignant undercurrent of seriousness in this novel. Kudera is the real deal.” -Ron Rash, author of One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight and Serena

“…an original, witty, uncompromising expose´of how we live now…This is a brilliant first novel.” -Joan Mellen, author of A Farewell to Justice

“[A] most impressive first novel with an unforgettable protagonist…I would not be surprised if Fight for Your Long Day becomes a classic of early 21st century American literature.” -Peter D.G. Brown, Distinguished Service Professor of German State University of New York at New Paltz, and Co-Founder, New Faculty Majority



About the Author
Alex Kudera is a Philadelphia native, and has been teaching writing at Clemson University in South Carolina since 2007. Fight for Your Long Day, which was first drafted in a walk-in closet in Seoul, South Korea, is his debut novel.