Real Life

Staff Top Fives 2020-2021

Our favorite books of 2020-2021.

Taking place over a hazy August weekend, Real Life is a pitch-perfect capture of so many things: a Midwestern university town, frustrations and uncertainty in academia, and emotionally charged 30-something dinner parties, to name a few. Biochem grad student Wallace takes a protective, guarded stance in his relationships, and the weekend holds multiple confrontations between and among his friends and labmates that challenge his ability to keep that protective distance while navigating very white spaces. Real Life is so good and so painful, in ways I struggle to articulate! I want everyone to read this book, and I want no one to talk to me about it because it makes me feel too vulnerable for other people to have read this book. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com

A FINALIST FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE

AND THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

"A blistering coming of age story" O: The Oprah Magazine

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, VICE, SELF, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness

A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends — some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

"Equal parts captivating, erotic, smart and vivid...[rendered] with tenderness and complexity, from the first gorgeous sentence of his book to its very last... Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and — more than anything — finding purpose, meaning and happiness in one's own life." Time

"There is writing so exceptional, so intricately crafted that it demands reverence. The intimate prose of Brandon Taylor's exquisite debut novel, Real Life, offers exactly that kind of writing. He writes so powerfully about so many things — the perils of graduate education, blackness in a predominantly white setting, loneliness, desire, trauma, need. Wallace, the man at the center of this novel, is written with nuance and tenderness and complexity.... Truly, this is stunning work from a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." Roxane Gay

"Brandon Taylor emerges as a powerhouse.... In tender, intimate and distinctive writing, Taylor explores race, sexuality and desire with a cast of unforgettable characters." Newsweek

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.