The masterful chronicler of contemporary American life and the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Real Life delivers a powerful tale of sex, politics and volatile journeys of self-discovery in Iowa City.
Brandon Taylor returns with his richest and most involving work of fiction to date, a novel of intimacy and precarity, friendship and chosen family, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life.
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 centre are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate 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 cafés, 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 them all irrevocably altered.
From the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Real Life and the international bestseller Filthy Animals, The Late Americans is a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781787334434
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 420 g
Dimensions: 218 x 144 x 28 mm
Assures and deepens Taylor's position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can do - Guardian
I loved The Late Americans and its funny, merciless, brilliant portrayal of the beauty and pointlessness of art, and the absurdity and horror - and occasional transcendence - of being a person. Magnificent - Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Romantic Comedy
Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature... Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book's last page - Harper's Bazaar
Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body. In The Late Americans, the body is an instrument and an archive, vulnerable to the complicated violence of pleasure and work - Raven Leilani, author of Luster
Taylor's most accomplished book, a panorama of youth in the era of late capitalism - Guardian
Elegant... Taylor has a Chekhovian generosity that enables him to convey character with something like tenderness... The relationships move like an eighteenth-century quadrille, at once restrained and spritely... Taylor's vision is unsparing, but never bleak - Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children
Sensitive and unflinching… The Late Americans is thoroughly contemporary - Financial Times, Books of the Year*
The Late Americans is remarkable. If you're going to write about art, the folly of pursuing it and the irrefutable power of it, you should probably do it well. Taylor does it truthfully and beautifully - Financial Times
Brandon Taylor has both a classic sensibility, expansive and elegant, and a razor-sharp ability to speak to the contemporary moment. The Late Americans is a full expression of his singular talent - Emma Cline, author of The Girls
A dizzying plunge into the lives of young people making art in America in the era of survival capitalism, grappling over the big questions like they're fighting over a gun. Deep within their ambitions, their pettiness and lust, is the meaning and even grandeur they seek - and whether or not his characters ever find it, Brandon Taylor has. A bravura performance on the edge of a knife - Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
In his latest novel Taylor is telling the story of a disparate group of Americans black and white, queer and straight young people. They are all at crossroads and trying to untangle their complex and complicated... More
The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor’s sophomore novel. Set in a campus town, it reads like an anthology of short stories with the characters appearing in other chapters as the friend, the classmate, the lover etc.... More
NO SPOILERS
I have read Brandon Taylor’s previous two books. Real Life (Booker Prize short listed) and Filthy Animals, and I loved them both. And I love The Late Americans, too. There’s a lot of small trivial detail...
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