Queer Book Club: "Real Life" by Brandon Taylor

A reading group focusing on literature through a queer lens, hosted monthly at Chicago’s premier bookstore for the LGBTQ community. Alternating between the “classics” of gay fiction and contemporary, historically underrepresented voices, we read to explore queer experience across literary genres and eras! Join us in a friendly discussion once a month! For questions about this book club, email Matt at matt@unabridgedbookstore.com.

This month the Queer Book Club will meet to discuss Real Life by Brandon Taylor on Wednesday, September 29th at 7:30pm.

A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends--some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature's Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction.
 
Real Life: A Novel By Brandon Taylor Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780525538899
Availability: Available, order here for delivery or pickup.
Published: Riverhead Books - February 16th, 2021

Event date: 

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - 7:30pm

Event address: 

Unabridged Books, Inc.
Chicago, IL 60657