Gina Frangello Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Gina Frangello
Gina Frangello is on faculty at UCR-Palm Desert’s low residency MFA program in the field of Creative Writing and is the Sunday Editor for The Rumpus and fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown.

She has been the longtime Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and Other Voices Books, which she co-launched in the year 2004.

Her short fiction work has appeared places like A Stranger Among US, Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, Clackamas Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly. She has also been a book reviewer and freelance journalist for the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune.

“My Sister’s Continent” was a “Read This!” finalist in the Spring of 2006 and was selected as one of the top ten books that year by Las Vegas City Life.

Gina’s debut novel, called “My Sister’s Continent”, was released in the year 2006. Her work is from the general fiction genre.

“My Sister’s Continent” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2006. Gina tells a contemporary version of Freud’s infamous “Dora” case study, which follows a loosely parallel plot. Kirby is a young woman that is trying to come to grips with a “failed” bout of therapy while also attempting to decipher the truth about the life of Kendra, her identical twin.

When she gets sent a skewed case study about herself by her former psychiatrist, she decides she will respond by using Kendra’s journals in order reconstruct her last months with her sister and her short time in therapy. With this, she will at last create her own version of the truth.

Readers found this novel to be a gooey, oozing mess of slop and plop that is about family, memories, and family secrets, pain and bodies. It is intense, and some were appalled at the raw realness of her super complete characters and some of the detailed descriptions and her full control over this subject. Gina is clearly an unflinching and honest author.

“Slut Lullabies” is the first short fiction collection and was released in the year 2010. Gina continues her exploration of the power dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in this collection of vibrant and diverse stories. It is like ready a private diary, and are sure to leave you feeling a bit traitorous as they also imprint a deep recognition of truths that you didn’t know you felt.

It is through chaos, humor, horror, and beauty that she manages to pull these ten stories out of her deep comprehension of the human experience. One precocious girl seduces a teacher so she can blackmail him to fund her young stepmom’s escape from their violent residence. A gay Latino male whose pious relatives boycott his commitment ceremony gets caught in splendor and hypocrisy when his lover’s Waspy mom hires some glitzy wedding coordinator.

A wife turns to drugs and infidelity to distract herself from the chronic pain she feels after an accident. One teen boy tries atoning in Amsterdam after he exploited his naive girlfriend back home. Lastly, one socialite has to face up to her dark past while her husband’s deterioration from Huntington’s ruins her social standing and bank account.

“A Life in Men” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2014. The friendship that Nix and Mary has endured since their childhood, and is a seemingly unbreakable bond. Until the middle of the eighties, when they embark on their summer vacation in Greece. It was a trip that Nix initiated, who just learned that Mary was diagnosed with a disease that would end her life early and was determined to try and make sure that it’d be the vacation of a lifetime. However by the time their trip to Greece had ended, Nix had withdrawn from their friendship, and Mary had no clue why.

Three years later. Nix has died, and Mary goes back to Europe in an effort to comprehend what exactly went wrong. Along the way she meets the first of the various men that she’s going to spend time with while traveling all around the world.

Through each of them she experiences not just a sexual awakening however an emotional and spiritual awakening which allows her to comprehend how the future and past are linked. As well as to appreciate the freedom to always live adventurously.

This is a tough to put down read with some vivid descriptions, interesting characters, and some clever insights. Gina gives the reader the opportunity to see her characters fully: flaws, strengths, and vulnerabilities and all. She may expose them, yet it is always with compassion.

“Every Kind of Wanting” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2016. This novel explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their efforts to have a “Community Baby”. Miguel couldn’t be more different from Chad, his partner and a happy go lucky real estate mogul from the North Shore in Chicago.

When Gretchen, Chad’s sister, offers them an egg, their quest to find a surrogate takes them to an old friend of Miguel’s named Emily, who is happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright that she is raising two boys with, named Nick. Into this web falls Miguel’s own sister, named Lina, who is a former stripper and addict. She starts a passionate affair with Nick as she deciphers the mysteries from her past.

However each action that these couples make has some unforeseen consequences. While Lina confronts some of her long hidden demons, and the rocky relationships between Chad and Miguel and Emily and Nick start fraying while the baby’s birth gets near, a stunning turn of events, as well as that secret Lina’s been hiding, threaten to break all of them apart.

This novel strips bare the layers of the American family in present day. It tackles issues like the morality of desire, assimilation, who “owns” love, and the legacy of secrets. The efforts to bring this “Community Baby” into the world get incredibly complex and provide plenty of heartbreak, drama, and suspense to fill up a miniseries.