List of All Possible Desires — Dylan Landis

From the O. Henry Prize-winning author of Rainey Royal, a radiant, disquieting new linked story collection that spans decades and generations as it explores desire, damage, and dislocation amongst members of New York City's artistic and unstable Royal family.

For fans of Mary Gaitskill and Lauren Groff.

In the third work of fiction tracking the troubled and libertine Royal family, the vulnerable young daughter, Rainey, responds to abandonment by her mother with fledgling artistic work and dark humor. We follow Rainey's coming-of-age in 1970s/ 80s Greenwich Village -- the risk-loving era of sex, drugs, jazz, performance art and the dawn of HIV. We also dip back into the 1940s and 50s to see family prehistory â€" Rainey's father as a manipulative boy, Rainey's aunt making a terrible choice to save a woman from abuse. Ultimately she confronts her father's cruelties to become an artist, reinventing a family and learning to fend for herself.