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‘Anna Karenina is a symphony’: 21 Questions with Brandon Taylor

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12 must-read queer books

Minor Black Figures

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a US bestseller, was awarded the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He tweets at @blgtylr, where he has 90k followers, and his newsletter can be found at: blgtylr.substack.com.

Over a hot summer in New York a painter falls for a priest, in this captivating modern love story from the Booker-Prize shortlisted Brandon Taylor 
 
‘One of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation’ Guardian 
 
‘Taylor has both a classic sensibility, expansive and elegant, and a razor-sharp ability to speak to the contemporary moment’ Emma ClineWyeth is a newcomer to New York, a young Black painter who is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. He shares a studio with his friends and earns money working for a gallery and an art restorer but he’s struggling with his portrait painting, unable to truly capture the life of his subjects. 
 
Then he meets Keating, a white former priest struggling with his faith. The two men seemingly have nothing in common, and yet Keating shows Wyeth how to see the world anew. The hot summer progresses, filled with art openings, walks around the city, and Wyeth’s search for a long forgotten Black artist. But as the men grow closer, the differences between them become more stark, until Wyeth and Keating must decide what they are willing to risk – for art and for love.A page-turning New York novel and a sweeping modern romance, Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of loneliness and connection.‘Taylor is fast emerging as one of America’s most shrewdest cultural voices’ Telegraph

Brandon Taylor

Assures and deepens Taylor's position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can do

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, author of Romantic Comedy

Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature... Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book's last page

Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body. In The Late Americans, the body is an instrument and an archive, vulnerable to the complicated violence of pleasure and work

Taylor's most accomplished book, a panorama of youth in the era of late capitalism

Elegant... Taylor has a Chekhovian generosity that enables him to convey character with something like tenderness... The relationships move like an eighteenth-century quadrille, at once restrained and spritely... Taylor's vision is unsparing, but never bleak

Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children

Sensitive and unflinching… The Late Americans is thoroughly contemporary

The Late Americans is remarkable. If you're going to write about art, the folly of pursuing it and the irrefutable power of it, you should probably do it well. Taylor does it truthfully and beautifully

Brandon Taylor has both a classic sensibility, expansive and elegant, and a razor-sharp ability to speak to the contemporary moment. The Late Americans is a full expression of his singular talent

A dizzying plunge into the lives of young people making art in America in the era of survival capitalism, grappling over the big questions like they're fighting over a gun. Deep within their ambitions, their pettiness and lust, is the meaning and even grandeur they seek - and whether or not his characters ever find it, Brandon Taylor has. A bravura performance on the edge of a knife

Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

An excellent second novel... Taylor is fast emerging as one of America’s most shrewdest cultural voices... In his fiction, he circles the terrain of the smart, lonely American male seeking intimacy and value in a materialistic, godless universe, in sentences so lissom and exacting you want to reach out and stroke them

Exquisitely sensitive... with flashes of beauty

Brandon Taylor writes with such precision and perception that reading his work is an immersive experience: you inhabit his characters, you share their nerve endings. The Late Americans is a brilliant and electrifying symphony of a novel. I loved it

The Late Americans has more bite than his previous work... What The Late Americans is showing us is despairingly true

A glimmering study of young humans in brutal times. This novel enthralls like an orchestra tuning, pours with rain, sizzles and glances knowingly from the page

Taylor is erudite and curious. The Late Americans is a book which is a product of his own reading and fascination with language and playing with form... One of the most exciting and uncompromising voices in literature

The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor's best book so far... His characters are all attempting to make peace with the cosmic bêtise of existence, to figure out how to live without compromising everything they value. It's beautiful and wrenching to watch them try

Tender and unflinching, tender because unflinching, Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is written with bristling clarity, wicked wit and audacious assuredness. The moment-to-moment pleasures of Taylor's prose are such that you simultaneously cannot wait to see where he takes you next while being happy for him to take you anywhere. A wonderful and structurally audacious book of relentless psychological acuity, emotional resonance and technical control, and reconfirms Brandon Taylor as one of the preeminent American authors of his generation

An ambitious, accomplished story... Come for Taylor's scalpel-sharp studies of human interaction, stay for the book's darkly comic portrait of millennial ennui

An intense, finely tuned book. Taylor is an inimitable talent

A beautiful, detailed writer, Taylor excels at penning his own expansive, contemporary versions of Victorian novels... One of his most exciting creations yet

Harper's Bazaar, *Books to Look Out for 2023*

Captivating... A remarkable literary achievement that provokes introspection and challenges societal norms, leaving a lasting impact on its readers

Following a group of three friends as they traverse love and life in Iowa City, Taylor's novel examines the intricacies of relationships through an intimate lens, deftly chronicling contemporary loneliness and desire

Brandon Taylor's characters in The Late Americans are obsessed with art, money, integrity, success, survival - and with one another. They can be deliciously catty, but they're also desperate to be loved. And repulsed by that desperation. They are, in a word, human. Taylor realises each character so fully, with such enviable - and often hilarious - granularity, that it's hard not to feel like I know these people, that I could pick up my phone right now and call any of them. It's the best kind of magic, this book. I'm already rereading it

Taylor is back with another exquisitely written novel about sex, race and artistic identity

The Late Americans' mood is one of tenderness and yearning

Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant... A gorgeously written novel of youth's promise, of the quest to find one's tribe and one's calling

Taylor’s characters find solace in moments of shared tenderness... His multifaceted portrayals show each of them to be as innocent and as flawed as any human

The best writer on work in America today

I absolutely adored Brandon Taylor's latest novel... A kind of tragic lyricism is combined with a vivid depiction of place, and as my first introduction to Taylor's writing, it already feels like a classic

James Conor Patterson, author of Bandit Country

Deftly directed by Taylor, characters swim in and out of the story, exploring a lived-in symphony of questions about what it means to make art, love truthfully, and live morally... His novels are so big – they contain the world

One of the best contemporary writers on young queer creatives, Taylor continues the theme with this offering about a group of Iowa City friends... Chaotic, messy, and loving

Brandon Taylor’s authorial voice is strong, and the grand design of his novel is carefully orchestrated... Taylor is adept at illuminating with grace how political the personal actually is... The novel suggests a deep understanding of human nature

In a university town, a circle of young men and women &ndash; Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima &ndash; navigate tangled webs of connection while they try to work out what they want, and who they are. 
 
As they test their own desires in a series of relationships, the friends ask themselves and each other: what is the right thing to stake a life on? Work, love, money, dance, poetry? And what does true connection look like, in an age of precarity?

Brandon Taylor

Praise for The Late Americans

Assures and deepens Taylor's position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can ...

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. Magn ...

Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature... Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, some ...

Assures and deepens Taylor's position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can ...

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. Magn ...

Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature... Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, some ...

Assures and deepens Taylor's position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can ...

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. Magn ...

Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature... Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, some ...

Books by Brandon Taylor

Articles featuring Brandon Taylor

‘Anna Karenina is a symphony’: 21 Questions with Brandon Taylor

12 must-read queer books

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