MINOR BLACK FIGURES: A Novel, latest from Booker finalist Brandon Taylor

MINOR BLACK FIGURES: A Novel
BRANDON TAYLOR
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A Black, queer iteration of My Dinner with Andre. That means I loved it, if you're wondering.

Wyeth and Keating are talking machines, and since I was interested and involved in what they were talking about, I was very gruntled indeed. I can imagine that, if you're not interested in two people connecting to each other with ideas about Life, Culture, and maleness, you'll be bored stiff.

Keating, being white, does not see...and more importantly, does not see that he does not see...important truths about being Black. I've whacked into that wall more than once. If you have too, apologize to your Black friend immediately, and hope they care enough about you to educate you. That is the most generous gift I have ever received, being shown how my on blinkered perceptions are not reality for anyone but me. (Thank you, Rob, thank you Nicole, y'all are excellent teachers.)

I was slightly nonplussed by the use of third person narration in such a Wyeth-centered story, and filled with many omniscient descriptions of Wyeth's thoughts...I get that it's like Louis Malle's camera from the films, but the point of a novel feels different than the point of a film. No matter. I think the ideas in the book, the conversations these men navigate, the channels they create with their flowing words, are fun and fascinating.

They won't be to people seeking action, events, or even simple changes in the characters...they are themselves, they don't so much alter as reshape their borders and boundaries to fit up against the other's more comfortably.

Are you, like me, in the early-winter mode of contemplation, of examination, of making sense of this wild and precious life we're (mostly) wasting? Here's us a book.

Recommended because it is exactly what it says it is, a rare gift in the literary world of hyperbole.