does it feel easy and comfortable to say like, I'm happy. I like living alone. So the thing about

that is I say that to people and they think it's like, oh, this person is like actually deeply lonely

and like he's just saying this as a cover. Like they don't believe me. This is death, sex, and money.

The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot

and need to talk about more.

I'm Anna Sale.

Brandon Taylor is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories, and he's a voracious reader.

And as you know, if you're still on Twitter, he has opinions.

Sometimes people will ask me, what are you reading?

And I'll have to make this choice of like, do I, do I say nothing? Or do I tell them that I'm rereading Anna Karenina and loving it so much that I physically can't breathe sometimes? And you just know that like, you can't tell them that because they're going to want to know, like, okay, but can you answer this question in a way that I personally can relate to and make some use of?

They don't want to hear Anna Karenina.

They don't want to hear it.

Brandon is 33, and until recently, he spent most of his adult life in and around academia.

He initially went to grad school to pursue a Ph.D. in biochemistry, when he wrote a lot of what

became his first book, Real Life. Then he left science to switch to writing and got an MFA at the Iowa

Writers Workshop.

Brandon is black and gay, and he writes about outsiders of all kinds.

The three books he's published so far take an intimate, incisive look at the ways isolation

can bloom in the confines of college towns and how race, class, and sexuality

shaped the particulars of loneliness there.

His latest novel, The Late Americans,

unfolds in Iowa City.

...