This September, Gina Frangello’s new Chicago-based novel Every Kind of Wanting will be published by Counterpoint Press, and we’ve got an exclusive first look at the minimalist cover. It’s quite the contrast from The Rumpus Sunday editor’s last book, 2014’s A Life in Men.
Here’s the blurb from the publisher:
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.
FICTION
Every Kind of Wanting by Gina Frangello
Counterpoint Press
September 13, 2016
ISBN 9781619027220
Adam Morgan is a culture journalist and critic who lives near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is the author of 'A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature' (December 9, 2025 from Simon & Schuster), and his writing has appeared in Esquire, WIRED, Scientific American, Inverse, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He is also the founding editor of Alderbrink, the Chicago Review of Books, the Southern Review of Books, and the Chicago Literary Archive.

