LoveReading Says
Set in Iowa City, and centred on a group of loosely connected individuals whose experiences and stories get under your skin, Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans lays bare how it feels, and what it means, to reach a crossroads in one’s life, with all the restlessness, doubt and prickly conflict that often entails.
From the aspiring poet who works in the canteen of a hospice, to a dancer and would-be banker, the characters’ longings, traumas, confusion and complexities are palpable, and there’s a suitable, subtle spikiness to the novel’s atmosphere.
A sense of impending reckoning rises as this diverse cast navigates the bumpy landscape of modern America, ultimately facing the ultimate question: what should I do with my life?
Deeply immersive, The Late Americans rings with honesty, stylistic invention and brilliant observations on human relationships.
Joanne Owen
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Brandon Taylor Press Reviews
The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor's best book so far... For all their disagreements and misunderstandings and incompatibilities, [his characters are] all attempting to make peace with the cosmic betise of existence, to figure out how to live without compromising everything they value. It's beautiful and wrenching to watch them try. - Boston Globe
Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body. In The Late Americans, the body is an instrument and an archive, vulnerable to the complicated violence of pleasure and work. -- Raven Leilani, author of Luster I loved The Late Americans and its funny, merciless, brilliant portrayal of the beauty and pointlessness of art, and the absurdity and horror - and occasional transcendence - of being a person. Magnificent. -- Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Rodham Brandon
Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature yet... Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book's last page. - Harper's Baazar
[An] intense, finely tuned book. Taylor is an inimitable talent. - Elle
Exquisitely sensitive... with flashes of beauty. - New York Times
Compelling in its determination to capture the tenderness of aspiring artists, their desperate ambition and crushing uncertainty... The Late Americans is remarkable. If you're going to write about art, the folly of pursuing it and the irrefutable power of it, you should probably do it well. Taylor does it truthfully and beautifully. - Financial Times
Brandon Taylor has both a classic sensibility, expansive and elegant, and a razor-sharp ability to speak to the contemporary moment. The Late Americans is a full expression of his singular talent. -- Emma Cline, author of The Girls
Elegant... [Taylor] has a Chekhovian generosity that enables him to convey character with something like tenderness... The relationships move like an eighteenth-century quadrille, at once restrained and spritely... Taylor's vision is unsparing, but never bleak. -- Claire Messud - Harper's
A beautiful, detailed writer, Taylor excels at penning his own expansive, contemporary versions of Victorian novels... The Late Americans is one of his most exciting creations yet. - Harper's Bazaar,Books to Look Out For 2023*
A glimmering study of young humans in brutal times. This novel enthralls like an orchestra tuning, pours with rain, sizzles and glances knowingly from the page. -- Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar
The Late Americans is a dizzying plunge into the lives of young people making art in America in the era of survival capitalism, grappling over the big questions like they're fighting over a gun. Deep within their ambitions, their pettiness and lust, is the meaning and even grandeur they seek - and whether or not his characters ever find it, Brandon Taylor has. A bravura performance on the edge of a knife. -- Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Brandon Taylor writes with such precision and perception that reading his work is an immersive experience: you inhabit his characters, you share their nerve endings. The Late Americans is a brilliant and electrifying symphony of a novel. I loved it. -- Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria
Following a group of three friends as they traverse love and life in Iowa City, Taylor's novel examines the intricacies of relationships through an intimate lens, deftly chronicling contemporary loneliness and desire. - i-D,Best New Books of 2023*
Brandon Taylor's characters in The Late Americans are obsessed with art, money, integrity, success, survival - and with one another. They can be deliciously catty, but they're also desperate to be loved. And repulsed by that desperation. They are, in a word, human. Taylor realizes each character so fully, with such enviable - and often hilarious - granularity, that it's hard not to feel like I know these people, that I could pick up my phone right now and call any of them. It's the best kind of magic, this book. I'm already rereading it. -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell
Tender and unflinching, tender because unflinching, Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is written with bristling clarity, wicked wit and audacious assuredness. The moment-to-moment pleasures of Taylor's prose are such that you simultaneously cannot wait to see where he takes you next while being happy for him to take you anywhere. A wonderful book. -- Colin Barrett, author of Homesickness
I absolutely adored Brandon Taylor's latest novel... A kind of tragic lyricism is combined with a vivid depiction of place, and as my first introduction to Taylor's writing, it already feels like a classic. -- James Conor Patterson - Poetry Society
Taylor is indeed a beautiful writer. His tautly constructed sentences are as concrete and vivid as the poems that the hapless Seamus adores. - UK Press Syndication
Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant... A gorgeously written novel of youth's promise, of the quest to find one's tribe and one's calling. - Oprah Daily
Taylor's most accomplished book, a panorama of youth in the era of late capitalism with a heightened awareness of Black and queer identity politics - Guardian
