Brandon Taylor

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Brandon Taylor

A close-up of Brandon Taylor.

Brandon Taylor

Real Life, the acclaimed first novel of Brandon Taylor, a graduate of UW-Madison with a master’s degree in biochemistry, was set in a Midwestern campus town…as is his new novel, The Late Americans, set in Iowa City and following the interactions of young people on- and off-campus figuring out who they are on the way to growing up. Washington Post reviewer Mark Athitakis calls it a “bruising, brilliant second novel.” Taylor will read from and discuss the novel at this event hosted by A Room of One’s Own.

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Brandon Taylor back to Room for a reading and conversation on his newest release The Late Americans.

This is an in person event at A Room of One's Own

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.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel 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 national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.