Filthy Animals: Stories

Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, Vulture, and more: The much-talked-about, deeply satisfying group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, from the "modern E. M. Forster" (Vulture) and Booker Prize finalist.

One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others.

In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young people in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.

Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

Story Locale: American Midwest