Brandon Taylor

'Funny, merciless, brilliant... I loved it' CURTIS SITTENFELD, author of ROMANTIC COMEDY 'Assures Taylor's position as one of the most important novelists of his generation' GUARDIAN 'Taylor is a sharp chronicler' RAVEN LEILANI, author of LUSTER What was happiness if not this moment, if not then, right then, the group of them, together for maybe the last time, coming together for this moment, for this very instant, what were they if not happy? Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima are running out of time to decide on their futures. In a university town in the American Midwest, this circle of lovers and friends ask themselves and each other: what is the right thing to stake a life on? Work, love, money, dance, poetry? Is love possible without harm? And what does true connection look like in an age of precarity? The author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women trying to work out what they want, and who they are. 'Remarkable' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Elegant... Taylor has a Chekhovian generosity' CLAIRE MESSUD, author of THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN

from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real 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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