Podcast Summary: Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, 2025)

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Chris Holmes for Burned by Books (Syndicated on NBN)
Guest: Brandon Taylor
Airdate: October 16, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode features novelist Brandon Taylor discussing his new novel Minor Black Figures with host Chris Holmes. The conversation explores the novel’s thematic and formal ambitions: its interrogation of representation in black art, its philosophical and erotic dialogues between protagonists Wyeth and Keating, the pressures on black artists, deep questions of faith and subjectivity, and the vibrant, multi-layered life of New York City. Taylor illuminates the nuances of creative process, narrative voice, and the pleasures (and challenges) of writing intimacy and sex. The dialogue is warm, intellectual, and candid, offering both close readings and broader insights into the responsibilities and contradictions of making art today.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Choice of Narrative Voice: Free Indirect Discourse

• Brandon Taylor on Narrative Mode
  Taylor employs free indirect discourse (FID) to capture both the deep subjectivity of Wyeth and the broader “voice of the world,” aiming to confound the line between personal and omniscient narration.
  • “There's something, like, quite magical...the ambiguity of not knowing if that's what the novel thinks is...truth. Or has the novel slipped back into Wyeth's perspective?” (Brandon Taylor, 07:13)
• FID is likened to how millennials negotiate social media personas—a blend of first and third person, “the default narrative mode” online.
  • “Even when I'm writing tweets, I'm…writing them as myself, but...I've slipped inside some persona that's also a character. Free indirect is kind of the way that we operate online and on social media.” (Brandon Taylor, 08:20)

Intimacy, Dialogue, and Intellectual Heat

• The novel seeks to integrate the physical and the philosophical, reminiscent of French cinema, where seduction and desire happen through talk.
  • “I wanted to write a book where people talk and fall in love by talking...people whose minds just, like, set you on fire.” (09:58)
• Taylor intentionally stages dialogue where characters really ask each other questions, embracing vulnerability—the “anti-chill.”
  • “One of the most attractive traits in a person…a moment of vulnerability to want to know more...It's the sort of anti-chill.” (13:29)

Representing Black Subjectivity and the “Double Bind” of Black Art

• Wyeth’s struggle: the pressure to make black art legibly political, versus the desire for artistic freedom and complexity.
• Taylor reads a resonant passage (18:21–24:13), articulating the existential and aesthetic questions black artists face regarding representation, history, and objectification.
  • “It seemed that black artists had gone from trying to expand the possibilities of the Negro figure to...strictly policing what was and what was not politically valent with respect to that figure. It was sad, both because...they were fighting the same fight...and also...with fewer tools and narrower vision, depressing beyond belief.” (read by Taylor, 20:00)
• The “inescapable double bind”: black artists always face an audience that already expects, or even demands, particular forms of representational “authenticity.”
  • “To create art as a black person in America is to have an audience that arrives sort of already imagining that they know what it's about...If you deviate too much in either direction, you're chastised for it.” (Brandon Taylor, 25:05)
• The book dramatizes the impossibility of pure motivations—“there are no noble, purely noble ways to ask this question.”

Art, Context, and the History of Ideas

• Wyeth’s engagement with the past insists that questions about race and art have long, unresolved histories.
  • “There's too much recency bias, there's too much ahistorical fiction...We'll end up writing fiction that is totally deracinated...What does Lukash say? A compendium of sensorial data.” (16:30)
• Taylor advocates for characters aware of traditions and context, resisting the trend of “vacant presentism” in contemporary fiction.

The Political Weight of Black Representation

• Taylor reflects on the fraught expectations for black artists to address suffering and state violence without being reduced to trauma.
  • “Wyeth...spends basically the whole book trying to figure out, like, why did I feel so weird about their paintings and why did I feel kind of insulted when people said I was being political?” (32:56)
• He invokes South African writer Njibulu Andebele’s call for “the recovery of the ordinary” as a political act.
• Autobiographical elements: Taylor describes giving his characters Slavic names to force the question of legibility and bias in workshop settings—a playful but pointed response to demands for immediate “readability” of race.
  • “You have to say that. You have to, like, use your human mouth to say to me that you don't think black people can be called that.” (32:56)

Faith, Religion, and Queer Dialogue

• Wyeth and Keating’s debates about faith probe the relationship between queerness, religion, and dialogue as a political act.
  • “Having two queer characters from very different racial and cultural backgrounds discuss religion...feels like a kind of political act.” (Chris Holmes, 35:14)
• Keating, an ex-Jesuit, allows Taylor to delve into Catholic history and the intellectual tradition of the Jesuits, with candid discussions of abortion, belief, and difference.
  • “Everything that I was afraid of—like, everything that I thought would shut the book down only deepened it.” (Brandon Taylor, 38:24)

Restoration, Technique, and the Materiality of Art

• Taylor expresses his fascination with process—especially art restoration and lithography—making “process a plot.”
  • “Instead of running away from that, I'm just gonna, like, lean into it. I'm really interested in how they clean paintings...the materiality of the process.” (Brandon Taylor, 40:37; 41:16)
• Technical detail in restoration anchors the novel and restrains metaphorical excess, focusing on “rubbing graded eraser on various grades of paper...just making that process as interesting and as beautiful as I possibly could.” (Brandon Taylor, 42:51)

New York City as Living, Democratic Space

• The city’s presence is vivid, democratized: the narrative enters the consciousness of subway vendors or unhoused people, dispersing focus from Wyeth to other inhabitants, echoing Zola’s narrative promiscuity.
  • “Part of the book's democratic project...is this dispersal of focus...the book occasionally can, like, see everybody in the city.” (46:28)
• The subway is metaphor and milieu—contested, vital, multivalent.

Writing Sex and Romance in Literary Fiction

• Taylor, influenced by romance fiction, strives for honest, playful, and physically accurate depictions of sex and intimacy.
  • “This book was my love letter to romances...I wanted the sex to be a deepening of intimacy...letting them enjoy it, letting the pleasure back in.” (52:15)
• Previous books' sexuality was fraught, often burdened with pain; here, pleasure, discovery, and evolution take precedence.

Book Recommendations (Reading List)

• Muscle Man by Jordan Castro—an “hilarious and wise Bernhardian riff” about a lit professor.
• Herculine by Grace Byron—about a trans woman in New York with occult and queer elements.
• Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton—dark, short classic novels celebrated for their intensity and complexity.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On free indirect style and social media:
  “Free indirect is kind of the way that we operate online and on social media. It's kind of the default narrative mode.” (Brandon Taylor, 08:20)

• On the necessity of dialogue:
  “I wanted to write some conversations where people hear what one another are saying but disagree and...have to talk their way to a mutual understanding or...a stalemate.” (Brandon Taylor, 10:50)

• On artistic freedom and black art:
  “Does a black artist just get to be an artist? Do they get to just make art? And what motivates them to ask that question in the first place?” (Brandon Taylor, 25:05)

• On process as plot:
  “You make process a plot…You write about process. That's what you do. You seem to really delight in process.” (Brandon Taylor, 40:37)

• On pleasure and writing sex:
  “This book, I consider the book where I discovered, like, a new terrain of, like, tenderness and intimacy…letting the pleasure back into the sex writing, letting the sex be warmer, be more playful, be more intimate.” (Brandon Taylor, 52:15)

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 05:41: Opening discussion on narrative choice and free indirect discourse
• 09:58: On writing dialogue and “walk and talk” films (Eric Rohmer, Before Midnight)
• 13:19: The “art of asking questions” and anti-chill vulnerability
• 18:21: Taylor reads a central passage about black artistic representation
• 25:05: On the “double bind” of representation in black art, agency, and audience
• 34:20: Representation of politics, violence, and the ordinary in black art
• 35:14: Faith and religion within queer life and dialogue
• 39:59: Artistic process and the craft of restoration/lithography
• 46:28: Building a democratic, multi-conscious New York City in fiction
• 52:15: Approach to sex, intimacy, and warmth in the new novel
• 56:16: Recent reading recommendations

Episode Mood & Tone

The discussion is intellectually rich but lively, marked by Taylor’s candor, humor, and willingness to question literary orthodoxy. Holmes’ questions are thoughtful and admiring, and he engages Taylor in both big philosophical debates and questions of practical craft. The mood is expansive, full of both seriousness and a wry sense of pleasure in talk—the very quality the novel celebrates.

Listen To If You Want:

• To reflect on contemporary black art, identity, and representation
• Candid insights into the writer’s craft, especially narrative voice and artistic process
• A nuanced look at intimacy, pleasure, and vulnerability in modern fiction
• To glimpse how a major novelist thinks about cities, politics, and the long history of ideas

Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures is a novel, and episode, steadfast in its refusal to simplify, offering a tapestry of questions—about history, race, desire, and art itself—without providing easy answers.