The Late Americans: A Novel (Hardcover)

Description

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INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, ELLE, OPRAH DAILY, THE WASHINGTON POST, BUZZFEED AND VULTURE

“Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant . . . A gorgeously written novel of youth’s promise, of the quest to find one’s tribe and one’s calling.” —Leigh Haber, Oprah Daily

The Booker Prize finalist and widely acclaimed author of Real Life and 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. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; 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 four are buffeted by a cast of artists, landlords, meatpacking workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of the 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 friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans asks fresh questions about love and sex, ambition and precarity, and about how human beings can bruise one another while trying to find themselves. It 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.

About the Author

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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.

Praise For…

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Praise for The Late Americans:

“The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor’s best book so far. . . . For all their disagreements and misunderstandings and incompatibilities, [his characters are] all attempting to make peace with the cosmic bêtise of existence, to figure out how to live without compromising everything they value. It’s beautiful and wrenching to watch them try.” —Charles Arrowsmith, Boston Globe

“Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant . . . A gorgeously written novel of youth’s promise, of the quest to find one’s tribe and one’s calling.” —Leigh Haber, Oprah Daily

“Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature yet. . . . Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognizable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book's last page.” —Harper's Bazaar

“Exquisitely sensitive . . . with flashes of beauty.” —The New York Times

“The best writer on work in America today.”  —Garth Greenwell

“With The Late Americans, Taylor has at once deepened and moved beyond the traditional campus novel. . . . Taylor’s empathy for his characters is bone-deep. . . . [A] bruising, brilliant second novel.”  —Washington Post Book World

“A delicious read.” —Brittany Luse, NPR
 
“Compelling in its determination to capture the tenderness of aspiring artists, their desperate ambition and crushing uncertainty. . . . 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

“A beautiful writer. His tautly constructed sentences are as concrete and vivid as the poems that the hapless Seamus adores.” 
—Associated Press
 
“The Late Americans chronicles these young people’s brawl for truth and understanding in their interpersonal relationships . . . and manages to turn the chaos into something beautiful. . . . We sit, enthralled by Taylor’s prose and immersed in his character’s stories, witnesses to the complexity of truth and its resistance against objectivity.”  —Brooklyn Rail

“I love this book. It’s such a brilliant evocation of life. And Brandon Taylor is a great novelist.” —Bill Goldstein, NBC-TV

“The Late Americans is a compelling, clever, funny, structurally audacious book of relentless psychological acuity, emotional resonance and technical control, and reconfirms Brandon Taylor as one of the preeminent American authors of his generation.” —Colin Barrett, Hazlitt

“Taylor’s elegant works of fiction . . . keep a tight focus on their characters, like a magnifying glass. . . . Taylor’s vision is unsparing, but never bleak. . . . He has a Chekhovian generosity that enables him to convey character with something like tenderness.” —Harper's Magazine

“Taylor deftly explores the myth of youth's unbound possibilities as it plays out in the face of constraints of time, space, class and wealth disparities. . . . The characters constantly strive to become better versions of themselves by embracing an ideal of passionate empathy that goes beyond pity or kindness, by striving to plumb the dark, even unspeakable parts of themselves.” —Thúy Đinh, NPR

“Deftly directed by Taylor, characters swim in and out of the story, exploring a lived-in symphony of questions about what it means to make art, love truthfully, and live morally. . . . [His] novels are so big—they contain the world.”  —Esquire

“[An] intense, finely tuned book. Taylor is an inimitable talent.” —Elle

“Provocative . . . Through Taylor’s signature intimacy, we see casual emotional devastation, prickly social interactions, and wry humor with keen clarity.” —Vulture

“Brandon Taylor takes a new spin and reimagines the classic friend getaway with queer characters. . . . Contemporary readers will love this provocative but intimate novel about friendships, ambition, and community.” —Cosmopolitan

“Finely rendered.” —Vanity Fair

“Taylor’s most accomplished book, a panorama of youth in the era of late capitalism with a heightened awareness of Black and queer identity politics.” —The Guardian

“A stunning work of fiction, with characters that are unforgettable and writing that is frequently breathtaking. I can't shout its praises enough.” —David Vogel, Buzzfeed
 
“Elegant and restrained.” —Vox

“I love the way Taylor captures the charged spaces that exist between friends and lovers. . . .  I also appreciated the way that the constellated form of the novel pushed subtly against the logic of scarcity that dominates the lives of its characters. No matter how alone they feel, we encounter them embedded in one another’s stories.” —Jewish Currents

“Anyone who's ever struggled to find themselves while so many around them are doing the same (hello, everyone's early 20s) will find kinship in this novel.” —Good Housekeeping
 
“The Late Americans weaves throughout perspectives of its cast of characters, creating a story you'll be thinking about long after you put it down.” —Town & Country

“A searing, layered examination of found family, gender, queerness, class, and artistry, The Late Americans is the perfect read for all the messy gay twenty-somethings in your life.” —Them

“[An] insightful and razor-sharp portrait of the interconnected lives of a cohort of writers, dancers, and thinkers living in the contemporary American Midwest. . . . A splendidly wrought and emotionally engrossing novel [that] continues to cement Brandon Taylor as a standout literary voice.” —Shelf Awareness

“Taylor’s characters come to life . . . through scenes cut with razor-sharp observations. . . . With verve and wit, Taylor pulls off something like Sally Rooney for the Midwest.” —Publishers Weekly

“Taylor writes feelings and physical interactions with a kind of sixth sense, creating scenes readers will visualize with ease. At the beginning and ending of things and in confronting gradations of sex, power, and class, ambivalence pervades. Lovers of character studies and fine writing will enjoy getting lost in this.” —Booklist

“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 and Prep

“Brandon Taylor writes with such precision and perception that reading his work is an immersive experience: you inhabit his characters, you share their nerve endings. The Late Americans is a brilliant and electrifying symphony of a novel. I loved it.”  —Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria

“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

“The Late Americans is 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

“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
 
“Brandon Taylor’s characters in The Late Americans are obsessed with art, money, integrity, success, survival—and with one another. They can be deliciously catty, but they’re also desperate to be loved. And repulsed by that desperation. They are, in a word, human. Taylor realizes each character so fully, with such enviable—and often hilarious—granularity, that it's hard not to feel like I know these people, that I could pick up my phone right now and call any of them. It’s the best kind of magic, this book. I’m already rereading it.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell

“Tender and unflinching . . . written with bristling clarity, wicked wit and audacious assuredness. . . . A wonderful book.”  —Colin Barrett, author of Homesickness