There he seamlessly bounces between highbrow and lowbrow. He attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and harnessed the power of Twitter to create a distinctive brand for himself. Taylor has spent the past few years quietly and steadily building up a name for himself. “I’m like, what Baldwin novel is this book in conversation with?” Taylor shouts, exasperated. “There’s this way black art is talked about,” he says, “that is invisible to white people.” These loaded comments show up when Taylor is compared to James Baldwin more frequently than contemporary writers such as Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk, who also mine the lives of messy, overeducated twentysomethings. One reviewer called Taylor’s novel, which takes place entirely on an unnamed midwestern university campus, a “heartbreaking tale of southern childhood trauma”. Mostly because the work of black writers often receives these coded, confining labels, much as rap music is often called “urban” and black fashion is called “streetwear”. Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.He hates when his work is called “raw” and “visceral”. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. 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. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. 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 AwarenessĪ novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.Īlmost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. “A blistering coming of age story” - O: The Oprah Magazine

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

Real life brandon taylor