Brandon Taylor

The author of the Booker Prize finalist “Real Life” and the bestselling “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. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates 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 three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa 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 intimacy and precarity, friendship and chosen family, “The Late Americans” 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.

The Late Americans

Lindsay

Naive enough to believe in poetry’s transformative force, but cynical enough in their darker moments to consider poetry a pseudo- spiritual calling, something akin to the affliction of televangelists.

on matters of cancel culture, which was not real except that sometimes it kind of was.

There was a hostility to public life now. Or maybe that hostility had always existed, and what was new was simply the directing of it toward people who had long been exempt.

It was the height of foolishness, academia. You sank down and down in debt, in desperation, in hunger, so that you could feel a little special, a little brilliant in your small, dark corner of the universe, knowing something that no one else knew.

It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs— it was that they all had the same pain, the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things— hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.

The nakedness, the blunt end of it, was distantly shocking to Seamus. But then, low, skidding across the surface of his tongue, something like want.

Sometimes he thought the only things he really needed in life were poetry and to be occasionally held down and fucked like dogmeat.

It seemed stupid to think that his life might intersect with the greater, terrifying course of life in the world.

When someone truly disapproved of something, they seldom said it. Why would you? The quality judgment had nothing to do with the object being assessed, he thought, but it had everything to do with proving that one possessed the faculty of discernment. They all were going around all the time trying to prove themselves, litigating the case for their own worth.

At times like this when two people he liked very much did not like each other, Noah wondered what to make of the pernicious nature of loyalty. You couldn’t be all things to all people, and any friendship contained such microbetrayals. This was the stuff of life.

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