AN INSUPPORTABLE LIGHT is the original Stinz novel, featuring Donna Barr's half-horse hero back when she thought of him as having two legs instead of four. This is the new 2008 revision.

The story begins at the end of one war, with the hope of peace. Then one small incident after another, building and combining like pebbles tossed down a slope, become an avalanche of misunderstandings, broken hearts, fury and revenge. It's about how wars start: nobody wants them, nobody can see them coming and nobody can stop them.

Donna Barr is offering the revised edition of the original prose novel, AN INSUPPORTABLE LIGHT, that became the source of her classic drawn-book series, STINZ.

It has a completely new cover -- bright red as befits a novel about war – as well as major revisions in and modernizing of the language, and of the beginning.

(Note: The very limited-run first edition of AN INSUPPORTABLE LIGHT, also printed on acid-free paper, is now officially out of print – and highly collectible.)

“Donna Barr’s writing could not possibly be like her drawing, because she draws faster than most people think. It comes close in other ways, though. In An Insupportable Light, Barr has found a way, as she does in her comics, to create a world taken from her own brain which we nonetheless are certain we must have read about somewhere in some history book or other.

Possessed of an uncanny knowledge of the European middle ages (due to exhausting research or a past life?), she brings a village and a people — several kinds of people — to life and demonstrates, with a writing style that is part poetry, part irony, how the very worst things can happen, purely by happenstance, to the most well-meaning of souls.

Is there a distant future echo in this book, of Homeland Security, or Patriotism acts, of Shock and Awe? I fear so.”

— Trina Robbins, Tender Murderers: Women Who Kill.

“This is not so much a story about a war as it is a portrait of human folly at its most resplendent. It is as poignant and relevant today as it was when humanity first formed civilizations; as it will be so long as we exist.”

-- Carlos F. Chancellor, Tales from the Cold; The Comic Art of the Northwest.

“If this is your first introduction to the talented Donna Barr, then be prepared; Barr doesn't pull any punches, and she hits hard. It's tough love, but you'll be coming back for more.”

-- Josh Ortega,Frequencies

AN INSUPPORTABLE LIGHT: The Original Stinz Novel

2008 Revised edition

Coming from A Fine Line Press, distributed by Diamond Distribution and Haven Distribution, December 2008.

406 black and white acid-free pages, 29 illustrations

ISBN: 1892253305 EAN: 998182-253309

Retail $37.95 (Print On Demand)