Brandon Taylor's Reading List

"It's sprawling and masterly and has the feel of a great novel with so many brilliantly drawn characters. I can't get enough of it."

"one in particular is Anna Karenina."

"It's this fascinating book of lectures she gave at Yale in the 1950s about the relationship between the individual and authority as read through literature. It's just so funny and right even when it's wrong."

"Leslie Fiedler's sublime cycle of books Love and Death in the American Novel, What Was Literature? and Waiting for the End should be mandatory reading in all classrooms of serious literature. Totally mind-shaking stuff."

"I was reading Claire Dederer's Monsters and found out that Jenny Diski was Doris Lessing's foster daughter! I was so shocked, I stopped reading."

"I am in the midst of reading all of Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels, and after I finish La Bete Humaine, I will read Germinal."

"I love Persuasion because it is a novel about people who change their minds, and there’s nothing more human than someone changing their mind and realizing the consequences of their choices. It’s a novel about grown up people making grown up decisions, but also it’s a novel about grown ups being childish and petty and silly. It’s her best novel, I think."