“FILTHY ANIMALS” by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead Books, 288 pages, $16).
Brandon Taylor, the Alabama-born writer whose 2020 debut novel, “Real Life,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize, tries to avoid setting his stories in the South.
“I didn’t feel like I could write about the South because I was too close to it,” he says. “When you’re too close, you can’t really see it.”
The Midwest – particularly Iowa and Wisconsin – has served as the primary milieu for his characters.
His best-selling book of short stories, “Filthy Animals,” won the 2021-22 Story Prize and has just been released in paperback. His forthcoming novel, “The Late Americans,” will be published in 2023. Taylor is an editor-at-large at The Sewanee Review, and he writes critical essays on his Substack, a blogging platform, called “sweater weather.” He lives in New York City.