DYLAN LANDIS reads from RAINEY ROYAL

Rainey Royal (Soho Press)

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.

Praise for Rainey Royal:

"Rainey Royal" gets under your skin, pushes you out of your comfort zone, and takes you to a truer, more frightening place. Dylan Landis captures the innocence and cruelty of teenage girls in flamey, jewel-like sentences that hover on the edge of rapture: read these stories with your heart in your throat."--Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude

"There is a line in Dylan Landis's lush, fierce, and stunning novel Rainey Royal, that perfectly captures this book's intense beauty. 'Rainey feels half like a butterfly has landed on her wrist and half like a knife is angled to her neck.' Rainey Royal is a chronicle of girlhood as a dangerous, delicate thing. There is edge and tenderness and longing to be found here. Always, though, Landis's words are a butterfly and a knife both cutting you open in necessary ways." --Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State

"Every woman has known a Rainey Royal. The coolest girl in school, the most daring, the most beautiful, yet the one who could turn on you--and then, bewilderingly, turn back. What makes a Rainey Royal, and her effect on everyone she encounters--that chaos of yearning, cruelty, woundedness, seeking, and human poetry--we needed a great writer to show us, and here she is. Dylan Landis has written a spare, elegant novel that's pure nerves, pure adrenaline. Should carry a warning, "do not read at bedtime.""--Janet Fitch, #1 "New York Times" bestselling author of White Oleander and Paint It Black

Dylan Landis is the author of Normal People Don't Live Like This (Persea Books), a linked story collection that made Newsday's Ten Best Books of 2009 and More magazine's list of 100 Books Every Woman Must Read. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, BOMB, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The New York Times Book Review and House Beautiful, among other publications. She's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Rainey Royal is her first novel.