Normal People Don't Live Like This author, Dylan Landis, earns 2014 O. Henry Prize and early raves for debut literary novel, Rainey Royal.
Dylan Landis follows the breakout success of her debut story collection, Normal People Don't Live Like This (Newsday's Ten Best Books of 2009, MORE Magazine's "100 Books Every Woman Must Read") with her first novel, Rainey Royal.
Greenwich Village, 1970s. 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. Told in 14 narratives of scarred and aching beauty that build into a fiercely powerful novel, Rainey's story is ultimately one of vulnerability, the artistic impulse, and connections between us that can't be broken, even if we wish they could.You can find more information about
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About the Author
Dylan Landis is the author of Normal People Don't Live Like This, a work of fiction that made Newsday's Ten Best Books of 2009 and MORE Magazine's list of "100 Books Every Woman Must Read." She has received a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, and her work has appeared in Tin House, BOMB, House Beautiful and The New York Times. In a past life she wrote six books on interior design. Rainey Royal is her first novel.
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