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Real Life by Brandon Taylor

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Real Life by Brandon Taylor

A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 
 
"A blistering coming of age story" --O: The Oprah Magazine


Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York TimesThe Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's BazaarFinancial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, VultureThrillist, 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.

Brandon Taylor is a staff writer at Lit Hub and the senior editor of Electric Literature's Suggested Reading. He received his master's degrees in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780525538899
ISBN 10 0525538895
Title Real Life
Author Brandon Taylor
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published 2021-02-16
Number of pages 336
Prizes Short-listed for Booker Prize 2020, Short-listed for Lambda Literary Award 2021, Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize 2020, Short-listed for VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize 2021, Short-listed for Young Lions Award 2021, Long-listed for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 2020
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.