Margins
Minor Black Figures book cover
Minor Black Figures
2025
First Published
4.27
Average Rating
400
Number of Pages

From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life. As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.

Avg Rating
4.27
Number of Ratings
11
5 STARS
55%
4 STARS
27%
3 STARS
9%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor
Author · 8 books

There is more than one author with this name Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature's Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has received fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.

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