Real Life, the debut novel by Electric Literature's Recommended Reading senior editor Brandon Taylor, has all the notes of a classic campus novel. It's got academic in-fighting. It's got complex hierarchies--and an associated web of alliances and betrayals--that link friends, lovers and rivals. And, most importantly to qualify for the genre, it's got a vaguely threatening undercurrent roiling beneath a placid collegiate surface.
Wallace is Black, gay and Southern at a large (and largely white) Midwestern university, and he is reckoning with the trauma, racism and homophobia that have shaped his life. He is in the trenches of a graduate program in biochemistry; reserved and self-protective, he is both completely consumed by the insular universe of his program and apart from it, which only intensifies his sense of seclusion. Real Life, which earned a coveted spot as finalist for this year's Booker Prize, showcases Taylor's elegant, thoughtful prose. --Hannah Calkins, writer and editor