Normal People Don’t Live Like This

SOHO PRESS, April 2026

1970s Greenwich Village: Leah Levinson can’t help worshipping the girls who torment her at school. Her perilous, magnetic friendships with Rainey Royal and Angeline Yost—girls she fears yet cannot resist—leave her desperate to shift the balance of power and affection. Meanwhile, Leah’s emotionally estranged mother, Helen, secretly rents a room uptown where she lives out a second life. And Rainey—whose chaotic upbringing fills her with artistic inspiration and dread—decides to risk everything on an act of vengeance in a legendary artists’ building. As we move between points of view, the New York of another era blazes with danger, beauty, and possibility.

Praise & Reviews

“Dylan Landis has a keen eye for the right detail, and is a master of deciding what to include—and what to leave out. Leah and her enigmatic mother Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose private truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments. Normal People Don’t Live Like This is a wonderful, intriguing, and original debut.”
—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2009

“Tense and intense, Landis’ prose is as taut and alluring as her characters.”
—Newsday

“Landis’s characters and the rich, rough worlds they inhabit are rendered with bracing precision and devastating grace. I can’t think of the last time I read a debut collection so powerfully alive.”
—Time Out New York

“Dylan Landis has a gift for creating characters…watch her very carefully. Once you can create characters like Leah (or Angeline, Rainey and Helen), there’s no stopping you.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Landis knows when to be dreamy, and she knows when to be sharp…These lost, damaged, but oh so alive women imprint themselves on the reader’s heart…Dylan Landis’ precisely observed women are on the verge of everything, capable of anything.”
—The New Orleans Times-Picayune

“The characters in Dylan Landis’s debut story collection, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, are blessedly extraordinary.”
—Vanity Fair

“Nothing appeals to me more than a collection of artfully arranged short stories that add up to a truthful, imperfect life. Landis’s characters, spanning adolescence to adulthood, are both funny and frank, vulnerable and resilient.”
—Washingtonian magazine

“Landis…writes here in a style attuned to inadvertent beauty. We see “the thin skull of her mer medium-boiled egg”…the women with “curbstone eyes.” In such eloquent prose, Landis conveys the understanding that it is a mean, dangerous, wonderful world.”
—Rain Taxi

“You read Normal People on the treadmill. You read it on the sidewalk. You meet Landis’s characters and you like them more than the people you know in real life. You think, while tearing through the pages: This woman knows all my secrets. Much like the work of Alice Munro, the intrigue of Landis’s stories lies in small gestures and the exploration of characters’ psyches with a thorough, delicate eye.”
—The Rumpus

“A clear-eyed account of what it’s like to be a teenage girl: Leah Levinson is gripped by the sexual escapades of her classmates and enamored of mean girls (her “heart sprouted like a seed” when one phoned her). The tales in this bravura work, set in the 1970s, are timeless: They could easily belong to our daughters’ generation instead of our own.”
—More magazine

“Delicious writing…Evocative, lyrical prose, and vivid imagery coupled with a subtle fictional approach, mysterious references, and ambiguities. Buy this for your literary fiction readers and short story fans—they’ll appreciate it.”
—Booklist

“Teenage girls make for compelling fictional subjects, and portraying them honestly requires a certain grit…Landis doesn’t flinch, lavishing attention on Leah’s obsessive-compulsiveness, the jumbled contents of her underwear drawer, and a friend’s sudden miscarriage.”
—Bookforum

“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.”
—Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint it Black

“Dylan Landis matches Margaret Atwood in her richly detailed acts of malice.”
—Politics & Prose

“Dylan Landis leaves me breathless with admiration. Her haunting, luminous characters hold secrets we can’t help but recognize as our own, and we’re privy to their most intimate, complicated moments. Beautiful and unrelenting, Normal People Don’t Live Like This had me nodding and sighing and thinking, ‘Oh, but we do, we do.’”
—Lisa Glatt, author of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That