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“... When​ I agreed to write about Les Rougon-Macquart, Émile Zola’s cycle of twenty novels, published between 1871 and 1893, I imagined it would take six months, after which I would write an amusing little essay about how we should all read more Zola.* This is not what happened. It took me two years. In that time, I had two books published, wrote another two books, moved from Iowa City to New York, taught myself film photography, became a professor of creative writing and an acquiring editor for a small press, adapted one of my novels for film, wrote a pilot for television, went on antidepressants, increased my dosage of antidepressants, stopped drinking coffee after 3 p ...”

“... Wallace,​ the protagonist of Brandon Taylor’s first novel, Real Life, is black, gay, overweight and from Alabama. When he moved to an unnamed university town in the Midwest to study for a doctorate in biochemistry, he told himself that he had to be ‘a Midwesterner at heart’ because ‘being in the South and being gay were incompatible … no two parts of a person could be more incompatible ...”

“... in Iowa City, home of the Writers’ Workshop, risks an inflammation of this tendency. Sensibly, Brandon Taylor pulls away from roman à clef territory and a hall-of-mirrors effect by ignoring practitioners of fiction and introducing a poet, Seamus, in the first section of The Late Americans.Seamus is a disruptive element in his seminar group, prone to ...”

“... out. Reviewing​ Fake Accounts alongside Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This, Brandon Taylor wrote: I’m not totally sure I believe in the Internet Novel as an aesthetic project … There are no black people in these novels. And what black people do exist only exist as superficial spoilers to liberal complacency. The modes and ...”

“... identifiable idiom, live in a certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone’. And as Brandon Taylor points out in his foreword to the new edition of Erasure, the narrator, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, introduces himself first as ‘a writer of fiction … a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker’, and then again in ...”

“... to my mind – ‘had sex’.We might write of reproductive freedom, of justice, what Astra Taylor writes of democracy: it may not exist, but ‘we’ll miss it when it’s gone.’ Well, some will (if the polls are right – but also, fuck polls); some won’t. This will be fractiously, violently contended in coming years, as it has been for ...”