Eric Newman speaks to Brandon Taylor about his latest novel, “Minor Black Figures.” It centers on Wyeth, a Black artist in his thirties wrestling with creative stagnation and the pressures of sudden fame after some of his paintings unexpectedly go viral. As he resists the temptation to produce the sort of identity-based art the market seems to want, Wyeth engages in recovering the life and career of a forgotten Black artist from the 1970s. He also finds himself entangled in a romance with a former seminarian whose views on art and faith challenge and inspire him amid the humid swirl of summer in New York. Taylor discusses the novel's origins, the white gaze and the struggles faced by Black artists, and how to write a good sex scene.
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Eric Newman speaks to Brandon Taylor about his latest novel, “Minor Black Figures.” It centers on Wyeth, a Black artist in his thirties wrestling with creative stagnation and the pressures of sudden fame after some of his paintings unexpectedly go viral. As he resists the temptation to produce the sort of identity-based art the market seems to want, Wyeth engages in recovering the life and career of a forgotten Black artist from the 1970s. He also finds himself entangled in a romance with a former seminarian whose views on art and faith challenge and inspire him amid the humid swirl of summer in New York. Taylor discusses the novel's origins, the white gaze and the struggles faced by Black artists, and how to write a good sex scene.
Chris Kraus joins Kate Wolf to talk about her new novel, "The Four Spent the Day Together." Organized into three linked sections, the book begins with a portrait of Kraus’s avatar, Catt Greene, and her family, as they struggle to overcome the isolation of the suburbs after moving into their first home in Milford, Connecticut, in the late 1950s. The book’s second part takes place many decades later: Catt is now a well-known novelist grappling with sudden fame and her failing marriage to an alcoholic ex-con named Paul Garcia with whom she lives part time in the woods of Minnesota. The final section finds Catt investigating a crime that has taken place near her home with Paul, in the neighboring town of Harding, when three teenagers senselessly murder a man after spending a full 24-hours together. What binds the stories together is alienation, chance, the acceleration of history and the spoils of late capitalism, the devastation of addiction, and an attempt to reconcile something even darker and more ineffable about the American project as it exists today.
LA Review of Books
Eric Newman speaks to Brandon Taylor about his latest novel, “Minor Black Figures.” It centers on Wyeth, a Black artist in his thirties wrestling with creative stagnation and the pressures of sudden fame after some of his paintings unexpectedly go viral. As he resists the temptation to produce the sort of identity-based art the market seems to want, Wyeth engages in recovering the life and career of a forgotten Black artist from the 1970s. He also finds himself entangled in a romance with a former seminarian whose views on art and faith challenge and inspire him amid the humid swirl of summer in New York. Taylor discusses the novel's origins, the white gaze and the struggles faced by Black artists, and how to write a good sex scene.
