List of All Possible Desires: A Novel in Stories - (The Rainey Royal Cycle) by Dylan Landis (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for the Rainey Royal cycle

"[Rainey is] achingly vulnerable and cruelly intimidating."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Dylan Landis's Rainey Royal is like its heroine: fierce, winning, and sharp as a blade."
--Vanity Fair

"Rainey will remain in my mind forever as one of my favorite characters."
--ELLE

About the Author

Dylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction the Rainey Royal Cycle set in 1970s Greenwich Village: the novel-in-stories List of All Possible Desires; the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors' Choice; and the novel-in-stories Normal People Don't Live Like This. Her work has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other anthologies. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction and lives in Los Angeles.