Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor sees the animal in you and wishes you’d get more comfortable with it, said Mitchell Kuga in GQ.com. His new story collection, Filthy Animals, broadcasts its intent in its title, and was inspired in part by the way human behavior was talked about in the Baptist household of his rural Alabama childhood. “With all the behavior that was bad,” he says, “you were always likened to an animal in some way.” But Taylor, now 32, remembers being so chastised at the oddest times. “It was always moments when I felt most like myself, like me at my most human, when I was a kid crying really loud or just screaming into the trees, you know? Or when I would be really, really thirsty from playing in the sun and I’d run inside and drink water, my mom would be like, ‘Oh, you drink just like a dog.’”

It’s not that Taylor romanticizes the animal world, said Sarah Neilson in Shondaland .com. He grew up hunting and eating animals. What’s more, the stories in the new book dramatize some ugly conduct, even though, like his acclaimed debut novel, Real Life, they largely unfold among academics in a Midwestern university town. “That’s just part of how I view human nature,” he says. “People have a lot of potential to be incredibly cruel and to really maim each other.” But Taylor, who once again features a protagonist who is a queer Black man, never forgets that we shouldn’t be ashamed of our animal nature. “All the characters in the book have in some way been called filthy just for being their human selves,” he says. His goal, he says, is to give them back “some sense of dignity.”