Order of Brandon Taylor Books

Brandon Taylor is an American author who made his smash debut in 2020 with the release of Real Life. The book was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. The book was also named to numerous best of the year lists including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, and VICE.

In addition to his work as an author, Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, and holds graduate degrees from both. At Iowa, Taylor was a an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of BrandonTaylor Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

If You Like Brandon Taylor Books, You’ll Love…

• Emily St. John Mandel
• Rumaan Alam
• Brit Bennett

Brandon Taylor’s debut novel was Real Life: A Novel. The story follows a young man named Wallace who is attending college to work on his biochem degree. Wallace is from Alabama, black, and queer so he is at odds in a lot of ways with the Midwestern university town where he is attended college. He is interested in self-preservation so he has managed to keep his distance from all, even his group of friends. Wallace is doing his best to keep it that way until a late-summer weekend that changes everything. He has a series of confrontations with his colleagues and then ends up in an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate. These events all conspire to fracture his defenses and expose some long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. Taylor’s blistering coming of age story asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and if we can, at what cost?