The Late Americans

Author Brandon Taylor
Narrator Kevin R. Free
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 1 January 1970
Run Time 9 hours and 16 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Interior life, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Narrative theme: Social issues.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.
Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima are running out of time to decide on their futures, in the new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of Real Life.
In a university town, a circle of lovers and friends navigate tangled webs of connection while they try to work out what they want, and who they are.
As they test their own desires in a series of relationships, these young men and women ask themselves and each other: what is the right thing to stake a life on? Work, love, money, dance, poetry? And what does true connection look like, in an age of precarity?
‘Funny, merciless, brilliant . . . I loved it’ CURTIS SITTENFELD
‘A constellation of characters shines in [this] campus-set tale of aspiring artists’ Financial Times
‘Intimate, hilarious, poignant . . . A gorgeously written novel of youth’s promise’ Oprah Daily
‘Elegant and razor-sharp’ EMMA CLINE

©2023 Brandon Taylor (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

Assures and deepens Taylor’s position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can do

Guardian

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 Romantic Comedy

Brandon Taylor’s third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature… 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 Bazaar

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

Taylor’s most accomplished book, a panorama of youth in the era of late capitalism

Guardian

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, author of The Emperor's Children

Sensitive and unflinching… The Late Americans is thoroughly contemporary

Financial Times, *Books of the Year*

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

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

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