Thank you for joining us on March 12.
The event was a huge success.
If you weren’t able to join us for the live event, click below to access the recorded video.
A CONVERSATION WITH BRANDON TAYLOR
Moderated by Lopa Basu, Ph.D.
Join us virtually on Friday, March 12, at 7:00 p.m. (CST)
Real Life takes place on a midwestern campus with more than a passing resemblance to the one that Taylor attended in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s the last few days of summer break. Wallace, a queer, Black man from Alabama, is a graduate student whose laboratory project has gone awry. Could it be the result of deliberate sabotage? Although the events that follow are packed into a single weekend, issues of race, gender, sexuality, history, and trauma all come to bear upon personal reflection, furtive romance, and one of the most disastrous dinner parties in recent fiction.
In addition to its Booker honor, Real Life was named one of the best books of 2020 by numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and VICE. Plans were announced in December for a film adaptation starring Kid Cudi. Our program will include a reading from the novel and questions and answers with Taylor.
Books with signed bookplates can be purchased from Dotters Books.
Have a question for Brandon Taylor? Submit it below and you might hear it asked during the event.
The Author
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He 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 Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.
The Book
REAL LIFE
A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend—and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. 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 a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a young straight man, conspire to fracture his defenses, while revealing hidden currents of resentment and desire that threaten the equilibrium of their community.
Real Life is a gut punch of a novel, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories—and at what cost.
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