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Real Life
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
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Publisher's summary
2020 Booker Prize short-listed
2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize long-listed
2021 Lambda Literary Award short-listed
2020 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize short-listed
2021 VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize short-listed
2021 Young Lions Award short-listed
A Finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
"A blistering coming of age story." (O: The Oprah Magazine)
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness
A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.
Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.
Critic reviews
"[A] stunning debut...Taylor proves himself to be a keen observer of the psychology of not just trauma, but its repercussions.... There is a delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry." (Jeremy O. Harris, The New York Times Book Review)
"Equal parts captivating, erotic, smart and vivid...[rendered] with tenderness and complexity, from the first gorgeous sentence of his book to its very last...Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and - more than anything—finding purpose, meaning and happiness in one’s own life." (Time)
"[Real Life is] a sophisticated character study of someone squaring self-preservation with a duty to tolerate people who threaten it. The book teems with passages of transfixing description, and perhaps its greatest asset is the force of Wallace’s isolation, which Taylor conveys with alien strangeness." (The New Yorker)
Featured Article: The Best LGBTQIA+ Listens by Queer Authors
We scoured the big and beautiful LGBTQIA+ canon to present some of our favorite queer-focused listens of all time. Truly great literature can foster a sense of belonging and the feeling of truly being seen. However, listeners on the hunt for the best LGBTQIA+ books out there know that finding stories about gay characters isn’t always easy. So, we’ve put together a series of lists detailing some of the best LGBTQIA+ listens available.
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In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends. Nainoa’s family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods - a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities.
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Glad This Was Free
- By Shad Huddleston on 04-01-20
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Guava Flavored Lies
- By: J.J. Arias
- Narrated by: Carrie Coello
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Sylvie Campos and Lauren Machado have hated each other since before they were born. For generations, the Campos and Machado families have blamed each other for stealing pastry recipes they claim their great-grandfathers originated before fleeing Castro's Cuba. Having spent their lives as rivals, Lauren and Sylvie are now in their early thirties and primed to take over their respective family bakeries. That means working long, hot, seasons of outdoor food festivals where they are forced to endure each other—albeit with a lot of bantering and barb-trading.
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Funny
- By Jay on 01-11-23
By: J.J. Arias
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Between Hello and Goodbye
- Between Hello and Goodbye, Book 1
- By: Emma Scott
- Narrated by: Teddy Hamilton, Desireé Ketchum
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Faith Benson isn’t your emergency contact, she’s the party-girl friend you call for a good time. She's the gal-pal who loves mimosas at brunch and martinis at Happy Hour. But her carefree lifestyle threatens her job at a top Seattle ad agency; there’s no one better at landing big accounts (when she shows up). But now her boss demands she take a leave of absence to get her head on straight.
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Listen between the lines❤️
- By Val on 03-24-23
By: Emma Scott
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Riven
- By: Roan Parrish
- Narrated by: Chris Chambers, Iggy Toma
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Theo Decker might be the lead singer of Riven, but he hates being a rock star. The paparazzi, the endless tours, being recognized everywhere he goes - it all makes him squirm. The only thing he doesn't hate is the music. Feeling an audience's energy as they lose themselves in Riven's music is a rush unlike anything else...until he meets Caleb Blake Whitman. Caleb is rough and damaged, yet his fingers on his guitar are pure poetry. And his hands on Theo? They're all he can think about. But Caleb's no groupie - and one night with him won't be enough.
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Emotional; Raw
- By whatcha.listening.to on 12-03-18
By: Roan Parrish
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The Seep
- By: Chana Porter
- Narrated by: Shakina Nayfack
- Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle--but nonetheless world-changing--invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible. Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence--until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life.
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“This is my pain. Let me have it!”
- By Martin Gibbs on 02-03-20
By: Chana Porter
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
- By: V. E. Schwab
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
France, 1714: In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever - and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.
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Prose style not to my liking
- By C.V. Cox on 10-18-20
By: V. E. Schwab
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The End and Other Beginnings
- Stories from the Future
- By: Veronica Roth
- Narrated by: Emily Rankin, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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No world is like the other. Within this masterful collection, each setting is more strange and wonderful than the last, brimming with new technologies and beings. And yet, for all the advances in these futuristic lands, the people still must confront deeply human problems. In these six stories, Veronica Roth reaches into the unknown and draws forth something startlingly familiar and profoundly beautiful.
By: Veronica Roth
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The Lightness
- A Novel
- By: Emily Temple
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother - a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial - Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center. Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls”.
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Perfect combination
- By Lauren yett on 06-22-20
By: Emily Temple
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It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boy band, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic.
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Well written, just a bad plot
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Ellis and Michael are 12-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time, it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day, this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then, we fast-forward a decade or so to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question: What happened in the years between?
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new favorite book
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Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man - a fellow slave - seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own.
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LOVED IT
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Study for Obedience
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A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him. Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.'
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Perfect novel
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By: Sarah Bernstein
What listeners say about Real Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Deborah Weir
- 06-27-23
Intriguing
Usually I love the readers of Audible books. This time I thought the invented voices for each character weren’t particularly great matches for their personalities. Just one straight ahead voice would have been fine and less distracting. The story was a deep dive into one character’s psyche and life experiences. It gave the listener just enough to care about him and let us fill in the missing pieces.
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- Beth Graue
- 03-14-21
Beautiful
This book is beauty as pain. Written in gorgeous prose it is heartbreaking. Evokes UW in every way.
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- Cora M. Yao
- 02-21-21
Impressions of Taylor's Real Life
This book confronts difficult realities for graduate students working equally hard on their research and personal lives. There is much pain in the lives of the characters in both settings. The hopes and dreams of youth are quickly engulfed by insecurities and brashness of new friends and sexual encounters. Finding one's self is an elusive goal, only achieved through both reflections of past family influences and what satisfies them now. Trusting the academic world is difficult and challenging; so is finding a person with whom to share daily life. The contrasts between Black, Asian and white characters are truthfully presented. Wallace and Miller begin to find satisfaction only when they acknowledge their pasts and begin to talk to each other honestly.
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- Lyanna Moore
- 04-25-21
Heartbreaking
I was not prepared for the emotional rollercoaster that this book would take me on. It left me in tear sometimes, angry sometimes and overall just emotional. There is so many different topics going on in this book that effect so many different people. And seeing how Wallace is trying to move on from the trauma that is his life only to counter more trauma was heartbreaking. I felt like the story had a poetic flow to it and that added to the storytelling. Overall I thought it was a good Story. I do wish that the ending would have gone slightly differently.
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- Adam
- 07-04-20
indifferent
Towards the end of this book the main character talks about being indifferent to something that just happened to him. That is precisely how I feel about this book. Indifferent
The Good: We have to start with Kevin R. Free. As usual he gives a stellar performance. He knows how to use emotion in his voice without making it too campy. The writing in this novel is beautiful. The words and description leaves nothing to the imagination. For a debut book I think this author has a lot to offer his readers.
The Bad: My biggest gripe with this book is the ending. If you are the type that needs a satisfying ending...or any kind of ending, this isn't the book for you. I honestly felt like we got to this big build up where the characters were going to finally make choices, like a person would do in Real Life, and then it just ended. And because the author has a tendency to jump backwards into the past to explain current characters, characteristics, or relationships I had no idea where the book ended was where it was going to end or needed to end. It felt empty. This isn't the type of book you can just make up your own mind where the story goes from the end.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Suzanne McFadden
- 01-04-23
Chilling, Excellent
Beautifully told story, from a perspective you haven’t heard before. I am sure the main character’s struggles will stick with me for some time.
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- Cynthia Gomez
- 12-15-20
I read this book for Kid Cudi
I didn’t know what to expect coming into this book. I started listening to it because of Scott Mescudi’s announcement of producing a film out of this story. The plot takes place over a single weekend, and as crazy as that sounds, the author is able to make it the most “real life” weekend. I wish I could write like this. I will definitely be reading more stories like this. I recommend everyone to listen before watching, the book is always deeper than the movie. I’m excited to see what they come up with though.
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6 people found this helpful
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Story
- Fred E. Fitch
- 12-29-21
Great prose, tedious plot
This story captures everything that is mediocre and tedious about gay life and academia. While the narrator does an excellent job at interpreting the tedious characters, the book does nothing to help me feel better about being a gay academic. I had to force myself to finish it. A complete disappointment.
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- Chanelle G.
- 08-27-20
Real Life
An honest story of the uncertainty and unfairness of real life and the traumas that get us there
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8 people found this helpful
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Story
- DS Hearn
- 09-30-20
Masterful storytelling and narration
This is a strong story - the places, characters, events. I was drawn in immediately by the author's skills. I wanted to know more about these people and their lives.
This is a brilliantly written book. Brandon Taylor's pacing and variation throughout are beautifully done. the story moves well, great pace and details - and he is a master of drawing readers into key moments with a slowing down and focusing in on specific parts of a scene. I enjoyed all of this book - and admire his skill in maneuvering through important current events and issues in this book. I particularly love his scenes involving water and food; some of those places I reread/relistened to, as a writer and not just a reader - I know I've already said this - but he is a master of this moving in and out, speeding us up and slowing us down, writing through the body, heart, entire being.
I enjoyed the narration for the audio version. there was enough variation of character voices to know who was who, but it was not too much to be distracting. His voice is clear, matched the story well, good to listen to. very well done.
I highly recommend this book.
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3 people found this helpful