Tuesday May 12, 2026
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
A dazzling novel in stories from a master of the form that follows the Royal family across generations of obsession, betrayal, and reinvention.
For fans of Mary Gaitskill and Lauren Groff.
In postwar Paris, a boy is seduced by his mysterious nanny into the world of adult secrets. In 1950s New York City, a naïve caretaker struggles to protect her charge, a married woman paralyzed by her recent stroke, as new bruises appear each day on her body. In the 1970s, a fragile cousin wanders into the Royal family’s jazz-soaked townhouse, where music, sex, and ruin intertwine. And at the heart of these stories is Rainey Royal herself, coming of age in Greenwich Village, inventing herself as an artist through the tumult of the ’70s and ’80s.
By turns shocking, erotic, and deeply humane, List of All Possible Desires is a haunting portrait of family and history—written with Landis’s trademark beauty and precision.
About the Author.
Dylan Landis is the author of the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This, and the novel in stories List of All Possible Desires, the three of which comprise the Rainey Royal Cycle. Her work has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other anthologies. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction and lives in Los Angeles.
About the Moderator.
Jessica Anya Blau was born in Boston and raised in Southern California. Her novels have been translated into many different languages, and featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN and NPR, and in Cosmo, Vanity Fair, In Style, Country Living, Bust, Time Out, Parade, Oprah Summer Reads, Oprah Daily and other national publications. The books have been optioned for film and television. Jessica’s short stories and essays have been published in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies. Jessica also works as a screenwriter, a ghostwriter, and sometimes as a writing professor. Currently, Jessica lives in New York.