BOOKS
THE LATE AMERICANS
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, ELLE, OPRAH DAILY, THE WASHINGTON POST, BUZZFEED AND VULTURE
“Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant . . . A gorgeously written novel of youth’s promise, of the quest to find one’s tribe and one’s calling.” —Leigh Haber, Oprah Daily
The Booker Prize finalist and widely acclaimed author of Real Life and Filthy Animals returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” These four are buffeted by a cast of artists, landlords, meatpacking workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of the city, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.
A novel of friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans asks fresh questions about love and sex, ambition and precarity, and about how human beings can bruise one another while trying to find themselves. It is Brandon Taylor’s richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life.
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Early Praise
“[An] intense, finely tuned book. Taylor is an inimitable talent.” —Elle
“Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature yet. . . . Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognizable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book's last page.” —Harper's Bazaar
“Provocative . . . Through Taylor’s signature intimacy, we see casual emotional devastation, prickly social interactions, and wry humor with keen clarity.” —Vulture
“A stunning work of fiction, with characters that are unforgettable and writing that is frequently breathtaking. I can't shout its praises enough.” —David Vogel, Buzzfeed
“Anyone who's ever struggled to find themselves while so many around them are doing the same (hello, everyone's early 20s) will find kinship in this novel.” —Good Housekeeping
“Brandon Taylor takes a new spin and reimagines the classic friend getaway with queer characters. . . . Contemporary readers will love this provocative but intimate novel about friendships, ambition, and community.” —Cosmopolitan
“The Late Americans weaves throughout perspectives of its cast of characters, creating a story you'll be thinking about long after you put it down.” —Town & Country
“A searing, layered examination of found family, gender, queerness, class, and artistry, The Late Americans is the perfect read for all the messy gay twenty-somethings in your life.” —Them
“[An] insightful and razor-sharp portrait of the interconnected lives of a cohort of writers, dancers, and thinkers living in the contemporary American Midwest. . . . A splendidly wrought and emotionally engrossing novel [that] continues to cement Brandon Taylor as a standout literary voice.” —Shelf Awareness
“Taylor’s characters come to life . . . through scenes cut with razor-sharp observations. . . . With verve and wit, Taylor pulls off something like Sally Rooney for the Midwest.” —Publishers Weekly
“Taylor writes feelings and physical interactions with a kind of sixth sense, creating scenes readers will visualize with ease. At the beginning and ending of things and in confronting gradations of sex, power, and class, ambivalence pervades. Lovers of character studies and fine writing will enjoy getting lost in this.” —Booklist
“I loved The Late Americans and its funny, merciless, brilliant portrayal of the beauty and pointlessness of art, and the absurdity and horror—and occasional transcendence—of being a person. Magnificent.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Romantic Comedy and Prep
FILTHY ANIMALS
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY USA TODAY, NPR, VULTURE, MARIE CLAIRE, THE TIMES OF LONDON, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, a hotly charged, deeply satisfying new work of fiction from the author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life
In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.
One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as “a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.” With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.
Praise
“Sumptuous, melancholic portraits of characters overwhelmed. . . . Taylor has a talent for taking the dull hum of quotidian life and converting it into lyrics. . . . These intimacies, often cozy, pair splendidly with the uglier, more brutal elements to establish the book’s focus: the feral that lurks under the veneer. . . . A perfect companion piece for our nervous era.” —John Paul Brammer, New York Times Book Review
"Blistering." —Time Out
“Taylor is an important literary talent, not least for his ability to render the familiar into the shockingly unfamiliar. Full of beauty and harshness, the complex and startling stories of Filthy Animals will stick with readers long after the pages are read.” –USA Today
“Luminous. . . . tap[s] into the peculiar, primal struggle of becoming who you are, and all the stories you have to tell yourself to get there.” –Entertainment Weekly
“Explore[s] love, longing, and erotic desire between an interconnected group of creatives in the Midwest with tenderness and a gentle touch of dry humor . . . Fully delivering on the promise of Real Life, Filthy Animals firmly establishes Taylor as a brilliantly inventive storyteller, and one whose beautifully drawn characters have that rare ability to really make you care.” —Vogue
“With Filthy Animals, [Taylor] applies his captivating, precise prose to the short form. These linked narratives thoughtfully examine a group of brainy Midwesterners dwelling deep inside their own heads, falling forward into one another's orbits.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Filthy Animals explores desire and human contact throughout, and while Taylor is a gifted descriptive writer, it’s the way he gets into his characters’ heads in the moment and in the aftermath—the confusion, the anger, the longing—that’s so hard to shake.” —Vanity Fair
“Stunning. . . . Each story has a cinematic quality that is wholly earned. . . . Emotionally rich but also physically grounded. . . . Filthy Animals allows its characters to crawl out into the open and learn to love.” —Los Angeles Times
REAL LIFE
A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness
A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend—and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a young straight man, conspire to fracture his defenses, while revealing hidden currents of resentment and desire that threaten the equilibrium of their community.
Real Life is a gut punch of a novel, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories—and at what cost.
“[A] stunning debut . . . Taylor proves himself to be a keen observer of the psychology of not just trauma, but its repercussions. . . . There is a delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry.” —Jeremy O. Harris, The New York Times Book Review
“Equal parts captivating, erotic, smart and vivid . . . [rendered] with tenderness and complexity, from the first gorgeous sentence of his book to its very last . . . Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and—more than anything—finding purpose, meaning and happiness in one’s own life.” —Time
“[Real Life is] a sophisticated character study of someone squaring self-preservation with a duty to tolerate people who threaten it. The book teems with passages of transfixing description, and perhaps its greatest asset is the force of Wallace’s isolation, which Taylor conveys with alien strangeness.” —The New Yorker
“Real Life is a tender, deeply felt, perfectly paced novel about solitude and society, sexuality and race. It explores what the past means and, with brilliance and sympathy, dramatizes the intricacies of love and grief.” —Colm Tóibín
“Brandon Taylor emerges as a powerhouse . . . . In tender, intimate and distinctive writing, Taylor explores race, sexuality and desire with a cast of unforgettable characters.” —Newsweek
“A pleasure . . . So well written I felt like I was watching the events, rather than just reading the prose.” —NPR
“It’s fantastic. He’s such a phenomenal writer, it just floors you.” —Elliot Page, Esquire
“[A] classical ideal of a novel . . . Every scene, every dialogue, fits perfectly over a hall-of-famer first sentence[,] delicate interlocking layers of story that build satisfyingly up and out around Wallace, his father, and his friends.” —The Paris Review
“A perfect, meditative read.” – USA TODAY
“Both calm and quiet and furiously dramatic, internal and external, Real Life moves like, well, real life—but with a key difference. Real life itself can be super boring. But Real Life . . . is utterly captivating all the way through.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, The Today Show
“Taylor’s vivid characterization is punishingly effective; his essayistic insights into cultural dynamics and their impact hold searing power. Erotic and ambiguous [and] hard to shake.” – Entertainment Weekly
“Shattering.” —Elle
“With the rigour of the laboratory, Taylor wields scalpel-like prose, putting human behaviours under the microscope . . . precise and masterly.” —Financial Times
“A novel of quiet, startling power.” —Harper’s Bazaar
“Taylor avoids cliches around campus living and instead—through various interpersonal and institutional scuffles—offers a look at the relentless erosion of dignity many students of color experience at college. —SELF
“Psychologically compelling, incisively satirical, told in a muted style that nevertheless accesses a full emotional range, this is a brilliant book, worthy of a wide audience.” —The Guardian
“A profound look at the depths of desire, knowledge and prejudice . . . a refreshing take on the traditional campus novel.” —VICE
“Astonishingly accomplished . . . Even at its darkest moments, Real Life is a piercingly beautiful book. In tracing the fault-lines that rip through Wallace’s emotional world, Brandon Taylor has written a truly exquisite story of love, sex, death, and microbes that is both intimate and expansive.” —Times Literary Supplement
“The writer who came most to mind as I read Real Life was James Baldwin, especially the erotic Baldwin, attuned to social pressure and violence, and deeply committed to the power, the uneasy force, of sex. . . . The exquisite tension in Taylor’s litany of physical details underscores the harshness that threatens the scene’s placid surface. . . . The details here have the savor of the real.” —Bookforum
“Real Life is a great American novel, a great college novel, a great summer novel, a great queer novel, a great novel of life as it has always been lived by young people waiting for their 'real life' to begin, and just a really, really great novel. . . . It's the best novel I’ve read this year.'” —Dazed
“Brandon Taylor’s Real Life doubles as a great grad student novel (most attempts trade in stereotypes; this offers the real, complicated, dark thing) and a great, positively Persuasion-like novel about the relationship between consciousness and embodiment.” —Commonweal
“A poignant, exacting story. . . . Taylor is an extraordinary cartographer of Wallace’s loneliness, crafting a finely wrought story of academia, intimacy, and identity.” —Esquire
"Taylor brings the precision of a scientist to his descriptions of Wallace’s desires and defenses. . . . [capturing] the ennui of those caught between the lure and the loneliness of academic science, trapped in an existence that doesn’t qualify as a 'real life.'" —Forbes
“A deeply moving study of race, grief and desire.” —The Sunday Times
“Real Life poignantly illustrates the dissonance of not feeling accepted or understood at an institution that aggressively markets itself as immaculately progressive.” —The Guardian
“A literary breakthrough.” –Interview