Brandon Taylor (born June 1, 1989) is an American writer. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa and has received several fellowships for his writing. His short stories and essays have been published in many outlets and have received critical acclaim. His debut novel, Real Life, came out in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Taylor's Filthy Animals won The Story Prize awarded annually to collections of short fiction.[1]
Early life and education
Taylor was born on June 1, 1989,[2] in Prattville, Alabama,[3][4] and grew up in a small community outside Montgomery.[2][5] Part of Taylor's upbringing was spent in a very religious, conservative Baptist setting.[6] Taylor's family is mostly illiterate, and he was often made to read his parents' medical bills and government forms. He taught himself how to read using his brother's textbooks, and grew up reading a combination of romance novels, his aunt's nursing-home manuals, and the Bible.[7][8]
His debut novel, Real Life, was published in 2020 with Riverhead Books. In 2021, a collection of his stories, Filthy Animals, was also published by Riverhead.[20]
Taylor wrote his debut novel, Real Life, in less than five weeks, and he later explained his approach: "I was like, I'm going to sit down and knock this out so I can get on with my life.... Writing a novel ruins your life in really specific ways. Because you have to live inside of it. It's just this sustained exercise in being miserable."[21] It is "a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines ... a gay black student from a small town in Alabama".
Published in 2020 by Riverhead Books, Real Life received critical acclaim.[22] Describing Taylor's work in the Los Angeles Times, Bethanne Patrick wrote: "His voice might best be described as a controlled roar of rage and pain, its energy held together by the careful thinking of a mind accustomed to good behavior."[23] According to the review of Real Life by Jeremy O. Harris in The New York Times, "It is a curious novel to describe, for much of the plot involves excavating the profound from the mundane. As in the modernist novels of Woolf and Tolstoy cited in passing throughout, the true action of Taylor's novel exists beneath the surface, buried in subterranean spaces."[24]Michael Arceneaux wrote in Time: "Taylor's book isn't about overcoming trauma or the perils of academia or even just the experience of inhabiting a black body in a white space, even as Real Life does cover these subjects. Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and — more than anything — finding purpose, meaning and happiness in one's own life... How fortunate we are for Real Life, another stunning contribution from a community long deserving of the chance to tell its stories." Taylor himself has said: "I hope that it's a novel that challenges people to think about the ways that we fit together in our relationships with one another. I hope it makes people think really deeply about both the ways that they are harmed, and that they do harm to others."[25]
Taylor's book tour to publicize his novel was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions on travel and public gatherings.[26]Real Life was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.[27]The New York Times included the novel on its list of "100 Notable Books of 2020".[28]
In 2021, GQ reported that Real Life was being adapted into a movie featuring Kid Cudi.[6]
Filthy Animals
Taylor's collection of short stories, Filthy Animals, was awarded The Story Prize in 2022.[29] In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Thomas Mar Wee wrote in praise of the book: "Neither cold nor detached, these stories are suffused with a warmth and humanity that recalled for me the uncanniness of Raymond Carver, the empathy of Alice Munro, and the meticulous irony of Chekhov."[30]
Taylor's second novel, The Late Americans, was published in 2023. It follows a group of writers in Iowa City, where he lived while getting an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.[31] While critical responses to the novel were mostly positive, the reception was more mixed compared to his two previous works.[32]
Upcoming projects
A June 2023 article published in The Guardian reported that Taylor was working on novels entitled Group Show and Other Years, as well as a Southern Gothic project called Kinfolks. He stated in the article that he had found the process of writing Kinfolks particularly daunting, as it represented his first fictional foray into the rural environments of his youth.[33]
On July 10, 2024, Publishers Weekly reported that Taylor is slated to publish two non-fiction books through Graywolf Press: one, a collection of literary criticism, due in fall 2026; the other, a book on the craft of writing, due in fall 2027.[34] On the same day, Publishers Weekly also reported that Unnamed Press, an independent publisher for which Taylor serves as an acquiring editor, had formed the imprint Smith & Taylor Classics, which will be dedicated to publishing lesser-known works by acclaimed authors. Taylor and fellow Unnamed Press editor Allison Miriam Woodnutt (née Smith) are the imprint's namesakes.[35]
From 2021 to 2023, Taylor read all 20 novels in Émile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart cycle after being commissioned to write a piece on the series for the London Review of Books. In the ensuing article, Taylor acknowledged how he deeply identified with the depiction of alcohol dependence portrayed in the novel L'Assommoir, likening it to the behavior he observed in his parents as a child. In the piece, he wrote:
The Assommoir is the most accurate, brutal depiction of the reality of alcoholism I have ever read, capturing too the strange, evil joviality that warps all the relationships in such a household. I found the book eerie and painful, and I wept at the end when Gervaise started to show physical symptoms similar to those I saw in my mother and father: the clumsiness, the persistent lack of memory, the tremors at all hours of the day.[37]
