Normal People Don't Live Like This - by Dylan Landis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Wonderful! Leah and Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose intimate truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments."―Elizabeth Strout

A jolting, sensual, and deeply compassionate novel-in-stories from one of the masters of the form.

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Normal People Don't Live Like This

"Dylan Landis has a keen eye for the right detail, and is a master of deciding what to include--and what to leave out. Leah and her enigmatic mother Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose private truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments. Normal People Don't Live Like This is a wonderful, intriguing, and original debut."
--Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge

"Tense and intense, Landis's prose is as taut and alluring as her characters."
--Newsday

"I can't think of the last time I read a debut collection so powerfully alive."
--Time Out New York

"Dylan Landis has a gift for creating characters . . . Watch her very carefully. Once you can create characters like Leah (or Angeline, Rainey and Helen), there's no stopping you."
--Los Angeles Times

"The characters in Dylan Landis's debut story collection, Normal People Don't Live Like This, are blessedly extraordinary."
--Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

"You think, while tearing through the pages: This woman knows all my secrets. The intrigue of Landis's stories lies in small gestures and the exploration of characters' psyches with a thorough, delicate eye."
--The Rumpus

About the Author

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