Normal People Don't Live Like This: A Novel in Stories (Deluxe Edition) - Paperback

by Dylan Landis (Author)

"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in the chaos of 1970s Greenwich Village, now in a deluxe edition featuring a reader's guide and a new, previously unpublished story.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 edition 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.

Author Biography

Dylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction in the Rainey Royal Cycle set in 1970s Greenwich Village: the forthcoming List of All Possible Desires; Rainey Royal; and Normal People Don't Live Like This. Her work has appeared in the 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.