Named one of the most anticipated books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Paste, Boo Riot, and Library Journal. Real Life is a novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice. Real Life is a gut-punch of a novel, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories—and at what cost.

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has earned him 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.

Fajr Muhammad is a writer from Philadelphia, PA. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and B.A. in English from Kutztown University. Her work has received fellowships from the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, the Rhode Island Writers Colony and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is currently at work on a novel.

Brandon photo credit: Bill Adams