I really, really, really, REALLY wish I could attend this, my friend Dylan Landis’s big D.C. reading for Normal People Don’t Live Like This, her new novel-in-stories. I’ve only read the first chapter so far, and just that tiny little taste was chillingly perfect, like an icy martini. Someone please go to this reading and tell me all about how fabulous she is!
Sunday, October 11, at 1 pm
Normal People Don't Live Like This
A novel-in-stories by Dylan Landis
www.dylanlandis.com
POLITICS & PROSE bookstore
5015 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008
www.politics-prose.com
Here’s a description of the book:
An extraordinary mix of the work of Mary Gaitskill and Scott Spenser, this remarkable fiction debut piercingly yet tenderly portrays the inner lives of a girl and her mother in New York City in the 1970s.
In ten discrete installments, written from a variety of perspectives, we follow the uneasy yet magnetic relationships between Leah Levinson, a guarded teenager, and the delinquent girls she worships. Leah and her artistic mother, Helen, struggle against the confines of their pasts and personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are as they make repeated, touching attempts to break free. Just when they seem to have reached an impasse, each makes an impulsive change of place: Leah takes a trip abroad with an endearing young man, and Helen rents, and fantastically ornaments, a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from the patterns of their old existence, daughter and mother independently glimpse the possibility of a different, more vibrant life.
And check out all this great attention:
Normal People Don't Live Like This is a wonderful, intriguing, and original debut."
ELIZABETH STROUT, author of Amy & Isabelle and Olive Kitteridge
"The characters…are blessedly extraordinary."
VANITY FAIR—Elissa Schappell, "Hot Type"
"Dylan Landis guides us into the harsh, secretive world of girls, where the mysteries of power and sexuality baldly govern."
JANET FITCH, author of White Oleander and Paint it Black
"Dylan Landis leaves me breathless with admiration. Her haunting, luminous characters hold secrets we can't help but recognize as our own."
LISA GLATT, author of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That and The Apple's Bruise