Minor Black Figures

Minor Black Figures is brilliant — an exploration of the fraught channel between faith and artmaking – Raven Leilani
Brandon Taylor is without a doubt our laureate of hyper-intelligent yearning - nobody does it better * Lit Hub *
Contemplative and sensuous… Taylor is onto something rich and appealing—a story unafraid to foreground love and lust, and that treats emotional ambiguity as a starting point, not as the fuzzy ending common in literary fiction. A piercing, precise, and affecting tale of young love and high art * Kirkus *
Dazzling… a poetic meditation on Black art, friendship, young love and intimacy * USA Today *
A sharp, resonant novel about a young Black gay painter adrift in New York who spends one life-changing summer grappling with questions of faith, desire, and creative purpose * Bustle *
Brandon Taylor is always a must-read, and his newest, Minor Black Figures, is another masterpiece… It’s a moving, thoughtful take on friendship, love, and art * Town & Country *
Mesmerizingly detailed…this novel of ideas about art, selfhood, and faith is also a romance, a friendship story, and an enjoyable slice of one hazy Manhattan summer * Booklist *
Sexy as hell… Paced to the languid, sticky rhythms of a New York summer… Minor Black Figures is Taylor’s most accomplished novel — a sustained, idiosyncratic portrait of an artist… imbued with a fresh, tentative sweetness, and anchored by a genuinely swoony summer romance * New York Times *
[A] stunning…novel… Taylor writes magnificently about art ?in a ?Künstlerroman that doubles as an inquiry into desire, faith and what it costs to create beauty in a world that would rather not see you * Observer, Books to Look Out For 2026 *
Discussions of faith, art and race delicately suffuse the book with a self-consciousness that captures millennial angst * Mail on Sunday *

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a US bestseller, was awarded the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His criticism has been published in the New York Times, Bookforum and the London Review of Books and in his newsletter, Sweater Weather.

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