“Filthy Animals” Author Brandon Taylor Has a New Novel, and Oprah Daily Has the Cover Reveal
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Brandon Taylor’s 2020 debut novel, Real Life, was a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize, and hailed as one of the best books of that year. His highly anticipated second novel—also in large part a “campus novel” involving characters who attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (from which Taylor earned his MFA IRL)—will be released in May 2023 by Riverhead. It is a gorgeously written novel of youth’s promise, of the quest to find one’s tribe and one’s calling. Oprah Daily has the exclusive cover reveal.
We asked Taylor why he and his publisher chose the image they did for the book’s cover, a painting by artist Logan T. Sibrel titled Chin Smooch. He told OD Books VP Leigh Haber, “For me, it captures a real sense of intimacy and warmth.” Taylor added that what’s depicted “could be a kiss, it could be CPR. It could be this man is sleeping. I love that there can be all these different interpretations of what appears to be a familiar tender scene. That feels very much in step with the novel to me.”
Iowa City is ground zero for this cast of lovers and friends in the process of launching their adult lives, grappling with questions about whether art is rooted in trauma, or if giving up a career in dance to become an investment banker is selling out. Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant, the novel is also an exploration of class, gender, and racial divisions.
In its press materials, the publisher describes The Late Americans as “a novel of intimacy and precarity, friendship and chosen family.” Taylor told us that he himself chose the usage of “precarity” because “it sums up where each of the characters are: all on the brink in some crucial way, whether spiritually, psychically, career-wise, or economically.”
Taylor, who is also author of the 2021 story collection Filthy Animals, is a kind of latter-day Renaissance man. He was studying for his doctorate in biochemistry before deciding to enroll in Iowa’s writing program. He’s a longtime fan of ballet, and has written before of the dance world. There are many art and literary references sprinkled throughout The Late Americans. He curates a viral newsletter called “Sweater Weather,” in which, for one, he professes his love for writers such as Mavis Gallant and Jane Austen, and in the latter case, accuses the creators of the recent Netflix screen adaptation of Austen’s Persuasion to be perpetrators of “a hate crime.” Some might say he’s a provocateur.
In his fiction, though, what Taylor is drawn to is the excavation of the tiny microstructures of social interaction. About that he says: “I always say that I was raised by wolves, where my family didn’t do a lot in terms of socializing me. When I entered school, and later college, other people seemed to know instinctively how to make friends or how to be in intimate situations, whereas I had no idea. That may be why I’ve always been very curious about what people say to each other after a fight, or just before sex, or when they’re about to kiss someone. As a writer, I’m curious about all the weird silences that occur in our daily interactions with other humans. I’m always trying to dig into those moments and find a language for them.”
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