Filthy Animals: Brandon Taylor - Softcover

Taylor, Brandon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911547984 ISBN 13: 9781911547983

Publisher: Daunt Books, 2021

Synopsis

A Publishers Weekly Fiction Book of the Year The first collection of stories from the author of REAL LIFE, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and winner of the Foyles Fiction Book Of The Year

In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, a young man tentatively engages with the world again. Recently discharged from hospital, Lionel meets two dance students at a party. Charles and Sophie’s relationship is difficult to read but Lionel is drawn to them both. As he navigates their sexually fraught encounters he is forced to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness – and to consider his return to life.

Elsewhere, a little girl runs wild to the consternation of her childminder; unspoken frictions among a group of teenagers come to a vicious head on a winter night; and a woman dreads a first date only to find that something has cracked open.

What connects these stories is the tension between the surface of things and the intensity of our inner worlds. With exquisite empathy, Brandon Taylor shows that though violence hovers at the edge of many encounters, so too does tenderness and love.

'Filthy Animals underscores what Real Life showed us last year: Taylor is an exciting new talent.’ --Literary Review

‘These stories provide further evidence that intimacy is Taylor’s great subject.’ --Financial Times

‘This impressive collection excel at the minutiae of daily life.’ --The Sunday Times

‘As with Real Life, Taylor’s first novel, this short story collection displays his talent for rendering the precise inflection of a relationship while exploring the drama of the body.’ --The Spectator

‘Filthy Animals is a study of our primal ambivalence toward others, its exact, lyrical prose cutting through to a subterranean layer of human relationships.’ --New Statesman

‘Brimful of beautifully drawn characters, at the mercy of their bewildering emotions, Brandon is a brilliantly engaging story-teller.’ --Daily Mail

‘[Taylor’s] prose quivers with an emotional hyper-vigilance that at times almost feels alive . . . extraordinarily good on the irresolute nature of desire.’ --Evening Standard

‘An absolute essential read in 2021.’ --Stylist

‘Fantastic—unsettling in a very human way, fully realized, and a major success.’ --The Paris Review

‘A collection of exquisitely interlinked short stories.’ --Vogue

‘An enthralling read.’ --Oxford Review of Books

About this title

About the Author

Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow in fiction.

From the Back Cover

In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.

One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Daunt Books
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1911547984
• ISBN 13: 9781911547983
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272