A very clever story based on relationships that intersperse with relevant issues that we all face or hear about. I absolutely loved this. I’ve read it all today and was feeling bereft until I realised he’s written more books. I’m hopeful of a sequel too 🙏

This is a campus novel about desire and never truly knowing what's good or bad for you. I hadn't read anything by the author before and found it a little heavy in places. That being said, it was well written and the characters were relatable up to a point.

Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans takes readers on an engaging journey through the lives of a group of friends navigating the complexities of adulthood in the bustling cityscape of New York. The novel effortlessly weaves together humour, heartache, and self-discovery, creating a narrative that is both relatable and thought-provoking.

The story revolves around a diverse cast of characters, each facing their own unique challenges and insecurities. At the centre is Emma, a young artist trying to find her place in the competitive art scene, while juggling the ups and downs of relationships. Taylor captures the essence of modern urban life, exploring themes of friendship, identity, and the pursuit of one's passions.

What sets The Late Americans apart is Taylor's ability to create authentic characters that feel like real people. The dialogue is sharp and witty, making it easy to connect with the struggles and triumphs of the protagonists. The novel beautifully captures the spirit of the city, depicting the vibrant energy of New York and the profound impact it has on the characters' lives.

The plot unfolds with a perfect blend of humour and drama, keeping readers hooked from start to finish. Taylor's prose is both eloquent and accessible, making "The Late Americans" a compelling read for both casual readers and literary enthusiasts. The narrative is filled with unexpected twists and turns, ensuring that the story remains unpredictable and engaging.

One of the strengths of the novel lies in its exploration of the human experience, delving into themes of self-discovery and the search for meaning in a fast-paced world. The characters grapple with their own fears and desires, making the reader reflect on their own journey through life.

The Late Americans is a captivating novel that captures the essence of contemporary urban life with wit and authenticity. Brandon Taylor's storytelling prowess shines through, creating a narrative that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. If you're looking for a book that will make you laugh, reflect, and feel a deep connection to the characters, this is a must-read.

Brandon Taylor writes very atmospheric books, I always feel like you wonder into the world he creates and wonder back out again at the end. The Late Americans is no exception, as we explore the lives of a group of students, through their messy, complicated connections with each other and their own lives.The author captures perfectly the restlessness of coming to the end of studying and wondering about what's next, how to transition into being an adult and the world of work in a world where race and class govern opportunities.
An intrinsically queer novel not following a linear path, rather showing complexity of these people and their lives. Brandon Taylor is a very sensual writer, from the way that people eat, dance, have sex, the weather and landscape, you experience what the characters experience through your senses, rather than perhaps a more detached intellectual reading. I really enjoy that about his writing, even if its not always comfortable, it does feel very real, queer.and for that I will always read his books.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Beautifully character driven novel in the style I've come to expect from Brandon Taylor. His tales are beautifully bleak, his characters complex, and there are always glimpses of beauty and joy in the sadness that he shares.

I will continue to look forward to anything he writes.

This was well written and very eloquent, but the story didn't grip me as much as is hoped. This is no fault of the non or the author however, I would recommend this. It is very well written!

I found this really hard to get into, I’m not sure if it was me or the book. I just didn’t really care so much about the characters or what happened and found it really hard to keep picking it up.

I could read Brandon Taylor all the time, and never get bored. I liked his two previous novels a lot, but in my opinion, this one is the best. He really shows his amazing writing talent, making the characters very realistic through the whole story.

I received a free e-galley of this book from Netgalley in exchange for a review.

I liked this more than Real Life. I felt this had more dry humour and the characters were subtler. This is a series of partially connected short stories revolving around characters in a college town. I found it to be a very effective portrayal of millenial life in academia; the struggles of pursuing an education and the pressures to do something ‘useful’ or even just make enough money to live on. That aspect of the book I really related to.

Unfortunately… I really don’t want to say Taylor can’t write women, but in this book women really don’t come off very well at all. The most predominant woman character for most of the book is a stock ‘annoying girl in writing seminar who makes everything about her trauma’. Which is a perfectly valid character to have, but I was uncomfortable with how much time was spent on her and the absence of any other women in the book. When the women’s stories do come, they feel tacked on at the end of the book, their characters totally flat. It really rubbed me up the wrong way, because Taylor can write characters well! It makes no sense that he suddenly forgets when it comes to women! But alas. Still, I enjoyed this overall, and it can only go up from here for Taylor.

The Late Americans examines what it means to be on the cusp of adulthood with all it's possibilities and responsibilities. Centred around a core group of friends, the books follows the interchanging relationships between them as relationships develop, change and fall apart. Taylor's characters are predominantly homosexual and live 'artistic' lives - they are dancers and musicians - coming to terms with the reality that they find themselves in, considering how they will make a living in a world that increasingly devalues the arts.

Passionate, romantic and considered, this book is at times challenging and more akin to a collection of stories. All of the characters are flawed, few are instantly likeable, but if Taylor is attempting to portray 'normality' then he has achieved his goal. If you are prepared for a deliberate reading experience and you enjoy literary challenges then dive in.

This latest release by Brandon Taylor reads less like an elaboration and expansion of those themes and dynamics we can find in his previous works and more like a rehash that sadly doesn’t feel as focused, cohesive, or satisfying as neither Real Life nor Filthy Animals. That is not to say that this was an entirely ‘unsatisfying’ read but since I have come to hold Taylor in high esteem and I ‘just’ expected something more from him. In many ways, The Late Americans suffers from an identity crisis: does it want to be a coming-of-age novel following a group of grad students, friends supposedly, a la Real Life? Does it want to be a series of interlinked short stories like Filthy Animals? Could it be both? Maybe, but The Late Americans struck me as a somewhat clumsy attempt at merging these two different structures. With the exception of Seamus, each character is given one single chapter that favors their perspective. These chapters however felt somewhat unfinished, not quite meandering but unfocused, in a way that the short stories in Filthy Animals certainly didn’t. Not only do the many characters populating this novel all happen to have names that are a rarity, or at least not particularly used, in America (seamus, ivan, fyodor, goran, timo), but most of them seemed to be stuck in relationships with all-too-similar fraught dynamics, share the same area of studies or are in the same field (for instance, we have several dancers), and respond and articulate themselves in a manner that seemed strangely alike. If Taylor had focused on a smaller group of friends, like in A Little Life, as opposed to including a couple of people who are ‘friends’ and then some acquaintances or friends-of-friends, maybe then I would have felt more invested in these characters’ lives and their relationships with each other. While I was making my slow way through this I kept thinking how less impactful Happy Together would have been if it had focused on several dysfunctional couples/people rather than honing in on the perspective of three people.

But before I ramble on about the story, and why it ultimately didn't come together (for me), I want to praise Taylor’s style. His unadorned and exacting language intensifies the oppressive, uneasy, dynamics and situations that he explores throughout his narrative. The people Taylor writes of are lonely, unable or unwilling to express themes, their desires, and their fears, and often end up sabotaging their own happiness or their relationships by pushing people away or by picking up fights with them. Many of them are post-grads or in their late twenties and unsure of how to go from their lives as students, to the ‘real world’. Taylor touches on a lot of everyday issues and worries that preoccupy people in their twenties. Are they okay with the person they are? Is the path they are on the one they really want? What do they want out of a relationship? Taylor’s characters seem to perpetually long for connection but are unable to actually see, listen, and make themselves vulnerable to others. Miscommunication, perceived and real slights, insecurity, and jealousy, all of these add tension to the relationships they have with their friends and lovers. Taylor is unremitting when it comes to identifying and probing his character’s flaws, and when doing so he often adopts a clinically detached tone. Yet, despite the cold and impersonal language, there is also a vulnerability, an intimacy even, in the way he hones in on those feelings and thoughts. I will always love the way Taylor is able to articulate and capture those more opaque aspects of a person’s psyche, allowing, when necessary, for ambiguity. Taylor also has a knack for portraying uncomfortable, stultifying interactions, be it an encounter/exchange between two people or a scene taking place at a party or in a class. The discomfort at times it’s almost palpable, and it isn’t always clear what causes this but this uneasiness between his characters is certainly felt, all of the time. I appreciated how Taylor's portrayals of love and friendship are often unforgiving, in that they contain more moments of ugliness, pettiness, and selfishness than say kinship, trust, and kindness. Like in Filthy Animals, Taylor often draws parallels between his characters and animals, ‘beasts’, in a way that is not dehumanizing but that allows us to glimpse, and feel even, the intensity of what his characters are feeling. In addition to being able to bring his readers uncomfortably close to his characters, Taylor can switch to a panoramic view of the people populating his narrative, so that we see them as ‘mere’ players of a larger game, and we realize just how little control they have, or they feel they have, over their own lives.

“These sundry interruptions and redactions, all the skirmishes and misdirection. Like a dog finally catching its tail and chewing it down to the gristle.”


Whereas I read Real Lifeand Filthy Animals over a short period of time, as I found myself invested in the characters’ lives, The Last Americans was less compelling. With the exception of Seamus and Fyodor, I wasn’t drawn to the characters. Timo and Goran, these two guys were very much the same, and their (supposed) friendship only exacerbated my confusion. Then we have the dancers, Ivan and Noah (i think it was them), who are involved with people who, to put it simply, don’t treat them right. Ivan’s partner disapproves of Ivan earning money through pornography, yet he doesn’t seem particularly close or interested in Ivan himself, whereas Noah is with an older guy who resents younger gay generations.
There are three main ‘couples’, and the conflict between them was very much the same. They have different upbringings, different levels of education, different values, and they want different things in life.

Later on, we get two chapters from two women, and these read like a belated inclusion of a female's perspective in this otherwise male-dominated novel. Taylor is more uncertain, and tentative even, when it comes to their characterization, whereas he allows his male characters to be messier.
The character I felt the most invested in also happened to be the one we are probably meant to find least likeable, Seamus. The guy is a sad asshole, a white gay guy with poor social skills who happens to antagonize or set others on edge. Yet, what can I say, I find pathetic characters like Seamus strangely compelling (at one point we get this: "Seamus liked to be used this way. Sometimes he thought the only things he really needed in life were poetry and to be occasionally held down and fucked like dogmeat." and "It was a guy with reddish hair and sad brown eyes. He didn’t look like he belonged to anyone."). He gets two chapters, and I was fooled into believing that because of this we would be given by no means a neat resolution to his arc, but something more satisfying than what we got. Instead, he seems merely forgotten after his second chapter, in a way that was unkind.
A lot of his chapters are sadly wasted on detailing his experiences in this poetry class he goes to. I have said it before, and I will say it again, I am not a fan of creative writing spaces. But I would rather be in one than have to read a fictionalized writing/poetry class/seminar because, more often than not, the authors present us with caricatures of the kind of people that would be in these places. They use meaningless artspeak, usually, they attack the mcs writing or invalidate their work, they feel the need to use performative language to appear morally superior and so on. Sure, in real life, you might get one, two, or even three people, in your class who use buzzwords to appear more enlightened than others and wear edgy tote bags that announce that they don’t give a shit about your ‘fragile masculinity’ or whatever, but a whole class?
I just didn't get the point of those scenes. In a way we are meant to see just how wrapped up in himself Seamus is, how he often expresses himself in a way that riles people up, and of his struggles to produce poems that conform to his peers’ expectations: they see poems as inherently personal and political, a cathartic art form, a way to talk about their traumas and personal experiences, whereas Seamus finds the idea of mining his past or drawing from his own personal experiences as banal (i guess he is more of an art for art’s sake kind of guy). The tension between him and the rest of the class had potential, but Taylor goes too heavy-handed in his characterisation of these women who Seamus calls ‘witches’ (something that is meant to emphasize how childish and on the defensive he is with them but frankly felt fitting). They are insufferable. Horrible even but in a way that comes across as less ‘clever satire’ and more ‘unfunny caricature’…in fact I found Taylor’s portrayal of these women to be devoid of subtlety, worse, mean-spirited even, the kind of sketch that you’d expect from people who will go and on about ‘wokeness’ and ‘man-hating feminist’ who are liable to 'screech' 'stop oppressing me' whenever a totally decent guy is just being nice. Whenever Seamus would open his mouth, sure, sometimes to make some provocative comment, things would just escalate in a less credible way than say the other fights and disagreements that populate this novel. Seamus writes a poem about the war, (i or ii, I cannot recall), about a nun (i think it was a nun), and expresses frustration with the way the other poets in his class elevate and romanticize trauma (i also hate the kind of thinking that leads some to see trauma as character-building or a source of ‘depth’ or ‘specialness’...), this leads to him being accused of being racist, misogynist, victim-blaming, and so on. Sure, traumatic experiences can lead to the production/creation of cathartic art, and this can help someone heal or take ‘control’, or whatever, but here the women are unanimous in their consensus that trauma leads to meaningful art and that if you express negative or critical feedback is you are invalidating the poet’s experiences etc. I think that there was potential to have a discussion about what art is and what art ought to be, but Taylor makes these women into such obvious one-note figures that I had very hard time 'believing' in them, let alone the opinions they expressed. Anyway, ironically enough, as they accuse Seamus of this and that and make disparaging comments about him and his poetry, they are themselves doing the ‘invalidating’.
I just hated these scenes, the women were too cartoonish, in their ganging up on Seamus, one of the only two male poets (at one point one continues to tell him ‘you don’t get to speak to me’). I wanted to learn more about him, to see him at his job where he makes clumsy attempts at talking to his colleagues, to see him outside of that cursed poetry class.
Yet, despite my hating the way Taylor portrayed this class, I did find Seamus to be the most well-developed character. He is very much flawed, lost, and seems resentful of the notion that being ‘privileged’.
I found his two chapters to be compelling, despite feeling uneasy about him or the way he behaves with others.

“But no one had a happy childhood. No one had a good life. Human pain existed in a vast supply, and people took from it like grain from a barn. There was pain for you and pain for you and pain for you— agony enough for everyone. The pain of his childhood was of such a common source that it embarrassed him. Perhaps it was this that he resented in the work of his peers. It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs— it was that they all had the same pain , the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things— hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.”


The other character that stood out was Fyodor. He is a ‘townie’ who works at a ‘leaner’ in a beef plant, and he is in an on-and-off again relationship with Timo, who Fyodor describes as “irritatingly middle class” and who often picks fights with Fyodor over his job, how unethical it is, and so forth. The two are in a love/hate relationship, drifting apart, arguing over petty nothing-things, breaking up, missing each other, getting back together, and reverting to the same tired cycle where neither feels understood by the other. Sadly Fyodor is also forgotten even if we glimpse or hear of him in later chapters.

“Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.”


The other lads, well. With the exception of the two girls, whose povs felt strangely ‘sanitized’ compared to the men, read very much too samey. I had a hard time distinguishing these guys from one another, and this wasn’t helped by the way they seem to use the same imagery or vocabulary to evaluate and understand the world around them, their sense of self, the currents of their relationships, sexual and non, and so forth. I just wished the novel could have focused on a smaller cast of characters, maybe switching between Fyodor and Seamus, or focusing on an actual group of friends because the whole dancer group did not strike me as actual friends.

While I do appreciate how Taylor explores power dynamics, codependency, alienation, loneliness, destructiveness, ennui, race and class disparities, as well as his cutting social commentary. As always he demonstrates a penchant for those inscrutable, occasionally petty, sometimes nasty feelings and urges that lead fights, heartaches, and misery. Yet, Taylor's critique of academia and his observation on the 'real world', lacked the urgency and depth of his other works.

Thank you to #Netgalley and #RandomHouseUK for granting me access to this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately, I had to bail on this one. I couldn't connect with any of the characters at all.

Thank you so much to Jonathan Cape books for the e-ARC of “The Late Americans.”
The good: I love Brandon Taylor’s writing. His descriptions of setting and character quirks are incredibly evocative, and the prose itself is beautiful. I couldn’t give this book less than 3 stars because of the quality of the prose! There was a nostalgic feel throughout — like the characters’ present felt like a memory to them even as it was happening.
The less good: this is pitched as a novel following an ensemble of MFA students, and ended up feeling more like a series of interconnected stories. Which is not necessarily bad, but it wasn’t what I was after given the book’s description. There’s so little resolution to each character’s story that, by the end of the novel, it started to become frustrating.
I also disliked the majority of the narrators, and had trouble telling them apart at times. I don’t mind unlikeable protagonists — in fact, done well, I love them — but the structure of “The Late Americans” didn’t allow enough time with them to get invested in them the way I would’ve liked. A lot of their relationship dynamics echoed and bled into each other’s, and while this included commentary about class and gender dynamics, it felt repetitive at times.
In short, I wanted to love this, and I’ll be trying Brandon Taylor’s other books, but unfortunately this wasn’t quite the one for me! However: if character studies are your jam, and the main thing you look for in a book is prose that is not just good but excellent, this might be the one you need.

I received an advanced reading copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK and the author Brandon Taylor.
I am slightly conflicted by this one! Beautifully written, haunting, visceral, and incredibly bleak. It was quite challenging to read at times not only because of the topics covered but because the characters were hard to keep track of. It was hard to keep your bearings and it wasn't clear whether this was deliberate. Lots of potential but 3 stars overall due to this slight lack of cohesion overall.

Sadly B Taylor is a one hit wonder for me. Real Life was impeccable, and his sentence structure still remains well executed in his softmore novel, but thematically it felt repetitive, and perhaps made more sense as interconnected short stories vs shoehorning the prose into a more traditional novel structure

The Late Americans is best described as a collection of interlinked short stories set on a university campus in which the characters as students are trying to navigate the world around them and come of age. Each chapter is introspective and encapsulates a miniature character study detailing the thoughts and feelings, trials and tribulations of the individual characters - the graduate students currently in attendance at Iowa City University. Most of the characters are gay male graduates studying some type of art form, whether it be poetry, fiction writing or dance. This makes sense with Taylor having studied gay science as a graduate student himself, however, whether intentionally or not, it culminates in the characters becoming interchangeable and difficult to differentiate as their musings and introspective rumination on everything from the state of modern art through to the social class/power and gay relationships to American higher education blur into one.

For instance, we are introduced to Seamus who is studying poetry and supplementing his income by working in a hospice kitchen. He discusses the pretentious nature of contemporary art and queries whether university/college is worth the extortionate prices and the racking up of debt just to gain what he believes to be primarily validation and bragging rights. The main occurrence in this chapter is his unexpected meeting with a "townie" named Bert one night while out having a smoke break in the hospice garden and giving him oral sex. It's Bert who is still in the closet and whose father is dying in the hospice. On his way home on his bike that evening, Seamus is followed by a black truck but convinces himself it's all in his head and not to play the victim, like his classmates apparently do. While trying to escape the truck he decides to go into the Fox Head pub and order a few Pabst Blue Ribbons to quench his thirst, and this is where he meets students Hartjes and Fyodor.

The buck then passes to Fyodor and goes through pretty much the same motions rumination, sex, study of the arts and financial struggle. After chapters continuing in this fashion for some time it becomes clear this is one of those plotless books where each student is having sex with a multitude of others whether in a relationship or not and they all tend to know about each other, too. In all honesty, I could've lived without the seemingly never-ending supply of sex scenes that are interspersed throughout, however, this may be an accurate representation of some students' lives, although I found it quite dirty and cheap and selfish without an ounce of meaningfulness attached. While it took me slightly longer than usual to get into this, by about halfway I was fully invested and enjoying the way the story was simply meandering and compelling me to read on.

The sentences are short and stilted which works stylistically once you get accustomed to it, and although this is set in the present day it has a distinctly anachronistic feel to it in that it feels as though it was set in decades past mainly due to some the vernacular used and the images certain phrases evoked. There are some truly glorious and beautiful turns of phrase Taylor uses which made it such a pleasure to engage with, and I was quite bereft when I came to the end. If you're looking for a book with a solid plot replete with action then this may not be for you as nothing particularly unusual or noteworthy happens, but that clearly isn't the point of this work. I, for one, will be looking out for more from the mind of Brandon Taylor in the future.

Brandon Taylor did it again. When I first read his debut novel, "Real life", I was astounded at his prose. At the way he wove through words and feelings with such precision, while creating an atmosphere both oppressive and freeing to the protagonist.
"The Late Americans" is a a kaleidoscope of queer stories, rarely happy but definitely complex and thought provoking. Taylor's chapter favour each of the character's perspectives, leading us through the ups and downs of these 20 year olds' lives and relationships. His way of focusing on each character's flaws and innermost thoughts shows how skilled of a writer Taylor is.

The loosely linked characters in this book are all united by themes of isolation and otherness.

When I read the first chapter set in a university seminar, I put down the book as being too irritating. On the second go I realised that Taylor was skewering the pretensions of the students . Seamus is desperate to be a poet, but must finance his dreams by working in a care home. He reminded me a bit of the narrator, Richard, of The Secret History.

Each of the characters from this campus town encapsulates some of conflicts and issues in contemporary America. How can they connect or live meaningfully when they are isolated by their sexuality, race or economic status or indeed some or al of the above?
It also reminded me of Joyce's Dubliners in being a snapshot of a particular time and place thereby illuminating the state of the nation.
Brandon Taylor is an amazingly talented writer who makes you understand and empathise with his characters even if you don't necessarily like them . It's all about nuance and psychological astuteness.

It certainly packs a punch for such a short book.

Taylor's writing is gorgeous, rich and haunting. This takes on themes that will be familiar to fans of his previous work - academia, race, class, sex and friendships. He's a master at establishing then skewering a character all in a single paragraph. I loved the broadening here to look at arts academia, and the way he writes about dance, art and poetry. I know I'll revisit this over and over in the coming years.

This is the third book from Brandon Taylor, after his debut Real Life and the short story collection, Filthy Animals.

The Late Americans weaves around a group of creatives in the midwest of America - poets, dancers and artists who are getting close to graduation, to moving on to the next stage of their lives, and wondering if they’re on the right path.

In that way, it’s very close to Filthy Animals, and while I enjoyed the format, I thought it would be much more of a novel, rather than an interconnected set of short stories. Taylor’s writing is physical and tangible, and you can smell the snow in the air and the sweat in the dance studio as you read.

I wonder if I read this slightly too fast, or didn’t pay quite enough attention to the names at the start, but I struggled a little with keeping track of who’s who and who’s sleeping with who. My recommendation is maybe to write a list of who’s who if you’re reading this, that might help.

There’s some sort of parallel with A Little Life, in the way that the discussion centres around what to do after graduation, if the people in the stories can or should carry on with their creative vocations, or get ‘proper’ jobs with or without pressure from their parents.

I recommend this for people who like short stories, who love lyrically beautiful writing and fans of Taylor’s previous work, of course.