NYU Skirball Book Club: Real Life by Brandon Taylor

BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST, 2020

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.

Date + Time

Friday Dec 4, 2020

5:00 PM

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Book Club 101

While we can’t gather in the theater, we’re taking select book clubs online. Join us via Zoom for Virtual Book Club. RSVP with your e-mail address so we can send you the Zoom link on the day of the event. How does it work? After a brief introduction, we will shift participants into self-led breakout rooms, in groups of about 10, so everyone can participate in a discussion before coming back to the main room to wrap up. Need a copy of the book? Order a copy from our bookshop.org list, and NYU Skirball will receive a portion of the proceeds.

Author

Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. His writing has earned him fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. 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.

Support

Co-sponsored by the NYU Office of Global Inclusion and Diversity.