Every Kind of Wanting

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, Gretchenstruggling with the deterioration of her marriageoffers 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 charactersacross all ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualitiesare blisteringly alive.

Gina Frangello is the author of the Target Emerging Authors selectionA Life in Men, which was a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the author of two other books of fiction:Slut Lullabies, a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, andMy Sister's Continent. She is the founder of Other Voices Books, has served as the Sunday editor forThe Rumpus, the fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, Executive Editor forOther Voices magazine, and the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published inPloughshares, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Fence, FiveChapters, Prairie Schooner, theChicago Reader, and many others.