Wednesday, November 4 - Dylan Landis

Today at 2:30 my guest is Dylan Landis. In her new novel- in-stories, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, Landis develops in one character after another a kind of interdependent consciousness --- whether the characters know it or not --- between mothers and daughters, bad-girl girlfriends and grown-up boyfriends and adult women in a book which Susan Salter Reynolds calls in a glowing Los Angeles Times review “photosynthesis,” comparing the main character to Holden Caufield. In this, her debut novel, Landis, who has worked as a journalist and nonfiction writer, arranges perspective with language and place across adolescence, creating in the story of young Leah Levinson in 1970's Manhattan a multi-dimensional portrait. Landis has published fiction in Bomb, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and won the Poets & Writers California Voices Award. About the novel, Janet Fitch writes: "In this bracing debut, Dylan Landis guides us into the harsh, secretive world of girls, where the mysteries of power and sexuality baldly govern, and adults and teenagers occasionally intersect across the barbed wire of a mutually earned mistrust." Listen on Wednesday at 2:30 on the radio or online, and download free from the KPFK audio archives for ninety days. http://www.kpfk.org. Thanks for listening.