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 caretaker struggles to protect her charge, a married woman weakened by a recent stroke, as new bruises appear each day on her body. In 1969, 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, struggling to come of age in Greenwich Village, reinventing herself as an artist despite neglect, even cruelty in the tumultuous ’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 beauty and precision.
This publication is joined by special 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 can be read on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating a world of almost unbearable richness and intensity.
Dylan Landis is the author of the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This, both in the Rainey Royal Cycle. 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.
Landis will be in conversation with Susan Coll, the best-selling author of eight novels, including The Literati, Real Life and Other Fictions, Bookish People, and The Stager, a New York Times and Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice. Her novel Acceptance was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, and Atlantic.com. She is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore.