The Late Americans

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In a university town, a circle of young men and women – Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima – 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?

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
Guardian

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

About Brandon Taylor

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. His criticism has been published in the New York Times, Bookforum and the London Review of Books and in his newsletter, Sweater Weather.

Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 09/05/2024
ISBN: 9781529922073
Length: 320 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm
Weight: 220g
Price: £9.99

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The Late Americans

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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

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

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

About Brandon Taylor

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