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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
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English
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EVERY KIND OF WANTING

Gina Frangello

A boldly inventive portrait of the American Family seen through the guise of
three Chicago couples struggling with money, fertility, and fidelity.
Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families. Miguel Guerra, who grew up in poverty in Venezuela before his family's relocation to Chicago, could not be more different from his partner
Chad Merry, a happy-go-lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. When Chad's sister, Gretchen—struggling with the deterioration of her marriage—offers the couple her eggs, they begin scrambling for a surrogate to carry the child, finally settling on Miguel's old friend Emily, happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright, Nick, with whom she is raising two boys.
Caught in the crossfires of these three families' bustling efforts to have their “Community Baby” is Miguel's younger sister, Lina, a former addict and stripper, whose needs and wants make her seem only peripheral to the surrogacy. Lina serves as the novel's overarching narrator as she falls into a passionate affair with Nick while deciphering the mysteries of her past.
Though the novel's timeline is framed by the nine months of the surrogacy, it also reaches back thirty years, to Miguel's childhood in Venezuela and the unsolved murder of his father. As Lina faces her long-hidden demons, and the fragile friendships between Miguel and Chad and Nick and Emily begin to fray at the seams as the baby's birth draws near, a shocking turn of events –and the secret Lina's been hiding – will threaten to break them apart forever.
By turns funny, dark, and sexy, Every Kind of Wanting strips bare the layers of the American family today. Tackling issues such as assimilation, the legacy of secrets, the morality of desire, and ultimately who "owns" love, the characters—across all ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities—are blisteringly alive.

Gina Frangello is the author of the novel A Life in Men, which was a Target emerging authors selection, a book club selection for NYLON magazine, and optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver &Delilah. She is also the author of two other books of fiction: Slut Lullabies, a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister's Continent. She is the founder of Other Voices Books, has served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, Executive Editor for Other Voices magazine, and the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review.
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Book

Published 2016-09-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

“[A] poised and intuitive handling of the complexities of damaged and fragmented families.”

“It's the balance between interior and exterior, tidiness and chaos, that makes Every Kind of Wanting so winsome. The reader sees the imperfections of these collective lives like a great tableau, as rich and human as a hand-hewn tapestry.”

Counterpoint Press

“Powerful, provocative, multilayered...As in Gina Frangello's entire body of work, the nefarious, neurotic and quintessentially human qualities of her characters compel the reader to relate to them and root for them, despite or because of the sexy, scintillating messes they make of their lives.” Read more...

“A twisted novel of family...which poses big questions about love, fidelity, and parenthood...Fans of Frangello's work will enjoy this intricate portrait of the connections between an immigrant Latino family and moneyed North Shore magnates.”

A Community Baby Read more...

“A darkly funny tale.”

Finalist for the 2016 Chicago Review of Books Award Read more...

“Funny and also dark, with likable characters, Frangello's novel is recommended for fans of witty fiction such as titles by Curtis Sittenfeld.”

“[Frangello] has subverted the old-fashioned suburban narrative, and filled it with a constellation of quirky characters...Frangello threads conflicts over ethnicity, class, and sexuality into the novel, and injects a smart topicality that gives it special resonance.”

“Frangello is an author who pushes boundaries...[T]he story fascinates and never falters. Frangello takes on an enthralling range of issues, from sexuality to assimilation, and keeping secrets is her greatest talent. Every page brings a new revelation, making the bitter end even sweeter.”

“Frangello's novel packs an emotional punch throughout.” - on "A Life in Men"