I have a short story collection called Filthy Animals, which I think will be out in the States next summer sometime. However, I’ve recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it’s that exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime writers for the first time. The writers who have been with me the longest are probably Mavis Gallant, André Aciman, Jane Austen, Alice Munro, Louise Gluck, Elizabeth Bishop, Hilton Als, and Pat Conroy.

John Paul Brammer, New York Times Book Review Taylor is a brilliantly inventive storyteller, and one whose beautifully drawn characters have that rare. Which authors have influenced your own writing? Colin Barrett, author of Homesickness Praise for Brandon Taylor: Taylor has a talent for taking the dull hum of quotidian life and converting it into lyrics. And it felt exciting to write a story in which someone like me got to have their say. And also, I love campus novels, they never seem to provide space for queer black people. BRANDON TAYLOR is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First. That contradiction between stated values and enacted values. And I found myself among people who had a problem with my blackness or queerness, but they had no language to articulate that problem or it seemed impolite to articulate it as such, and as a writer, I can’t not be interested in something like that. And in America, Academia is often considered a very liberal or progressive context, but I found it to be quite hostile at times. Honestly, I’ve spent a lot of time in academia – first as a student and then later as an instructor and researcher. Your protagonist is a queer, black man inhabiting the immensely white space of academia.

Brandon taylor novel