The Center for Fiction Presents Brandon Taylor on Minor Black Figures with Matthew Sitman

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT October 21, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

MinorBlackFigures cover

Join us in welcoming Brandon Taylor, Booker Prize finalist and bestselling author of Real Life and Filthy Animals, back to our stage to celebrate the release of his highly anticipated sophomore novel Minor Black Figures. Matthew Sitman, host of the Know Your Enemy podcast, will join Taylor in conversation.

In Minor Black Figures, Taylor casts a sharp gaze on the New York art scene through the eyes of Wyeth, a young Black painter caught in the throes of creative struggle. As Wyeth searches for inspiration, he confronts the fraught relationship between Black and white art and wrestles with the complex ways the Black body is perceived and represented. Alongside these tensions, he also faces compromises demanded of artmaking and the simple act of living.

Evocative, human, and unflinching, Taylor once again delivers a powerful story filled with memorable characters and razor-sharp dialogue. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from one of contemporary literature’s leading voices. A book signing with Taylor will follow the event.

MinorBlackFigures cover

In Conversation

  • Brandon Taylor (c) Haolun Xu

    Brandon Taylor

    Brandon Taylor

    Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.


    Photo Credit: Haolun Xu

  • Matt Sitman

    Matthew Sitman

    Matthew Sitman

    Matthew Sitman is the co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast and a writer in New York City.


    Photo Credit: Courtesy of Matthew Sitman

Featured Book

  1. . 
    MinorBlackFigures cover

    Minor Black Figures

    By Brandon Taylor

    Published by Penguin Publishing Group

    PURCHASE

    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.

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