Kirjahaku

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality, in a once-elegant, now-decaying brownstone. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father's best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build a substitute family. She's a rebel, even a criminal, but she's also deeply vulnerable, fighting to figure out how to put back in place the boundaries her life has knocked down, and more than that, struggling to learn how to be an artist and a person in a broken world. "Rainey Royal" is told in 14 narratives of scarred and aching beauty that build into a fiercely powerful novel: the harrowing and ultimately affirming story of a young artist.

A dazzling novel in stories from a master of the form that follows the Royal family across generations of obsession, betrayal, and reinvention. For fans of Mary Gaitskill and Lauren Groff. In postwar Paris, a boy is seduced by his mysterious nanny into a world of adult secrets. In 1950s New York, a young woman struggles to protect her stroke-stricken charge as bruises multiply on the woman's body. In the 1970s, a fragile cousin wanders into the Royals' jazz-soaked townhouse, where music, sex, and ruin intertwine. And at the heart of these stories is Rainey Royal herself, coming of age in Greenwich Village, inventing herself as an artist through the tumult of the '70s and '80s. By turns shocking, erotic, and deeply humane, List of All Possible Desires is a haunting portrait of family and history--written with Landis's trademark intensity and precision. This publication is joined by expanded reissues of the other two books in the Rainey Royal Cycle, the novel in stories Normal People Don't Live Like This and the novel Rainey Royal. Each book stands on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating one of the richest and most intense worlds in contemporary American fiction.

"Wonderful Leah and Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose intimate truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments."―Elizabeth Strout A jolting, sensual novel-in-stories that traces the crises, cruelties and passions of girls and mothers in the chaos of 1970s Greenwich Village, now in a deluxe edition featuring a reader's guide and a new, previously unpublished story. 1970s Greenwich Village: Leah Levinson can't help worshipping the girls who torment her at school. Her perilous, magnetic friendships with Rainey Royal and Angeline Yost--girls she fears yet cannot resist--leave her desperate to shift the balance of power and affection. Meanwhile, Leah's emotionally estranged mother, Helen, secretly rents a room uptown where she lives out a second life. And Rainey--whose chaotic upbringing fills her with artistic inspiration and dread--decides to risk everything on an act of vengeance in a legendary artists' building. As we move between points of view, the New York of another era blazes with danger, beauty, and possibility. First published in 2009 and now expanded with a new story, Normal People Don't Live Like This is a luminous depiction of the crises, cruelties, and passions of girls and mothers, and the first book in the Rainey Royal Cycle. It is joined by a new novel-in-stories, List of All Possible Desires, and a deluxe reissue of the 2014 novel Rainey Royal. Each book stands on its own, yet together they echo and amplify one another, creating one of the richest and most intense worlds in contemporary American fiction.

The acclaimed novel of girlhood, friendship, and sexuality set in the bohemian Greenwich Village of 1970 New York, now in a deluxe edition with a new introduction by Jessica Anya Blau. Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal--fierce, gifted, and dangerously magnetic--lives in a once-elegant, now-crumbling townhouse with her cultish jazz-pianist father and the women who orbit him. Her mother is gone. Her father's best friend hovers too close. And Rainey, left largely to her own devices, must learn to navigate desire, betrayal, and vulnerability in a city that shimmers with promise and threat. As she gathers friends and misfits into her orbit, Rainey tests the limits of who she can become--sometimes a rebel, sometimes a criminal, always a girl determined to recreate herself as both an artist and a young woman in a fractured world. First published in 2014, this deluxe edition of Rainey Royal includes a new introduction by Jessica Anya Blau. It is a part of the Rainey Royal Cycle, now joined by a new novel-in-stories, List of all Possible Desires, and an expanded version of the 2009 novel-in-stories Normal People Don't Live Like This. Each books stands on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating one of the richest and most intense worlds in contemporary American fiction.

At the center of this startling fiction debut is Leah Levinson, a teen at sea in the anonymous ordeals of a middle-class upbringing on the Upper West Side in the 1970s. In ten installments, written from varying perspectives, we witness her uneasy relationships with faster, looser peers--girls she is drawn to but also alienated by. No one, though, alienates Leah more than her mother, Helen. Estranged yet intertwined, they struggle within the confines of their personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are. Just when they seem at a lonely impasse, each makes an impulsive change--Leah taking a risky trip abroad, Helen renting a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from their old patterns, the two of them independently glimpse the possibility of a more hopeful life. Dylan Landis is a gifted portraitist of unforgettable female characters. Normal People Don't Live Like This is a striking debut.