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 AwarenessA 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.
