bA 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 /bbr  bbr A blistering coming of age story   iO: The Oprah Magazine/i/b brbrbNamed a Best Book of the Year by iThe New York Times/i, iThe Washington Post/i, New York Public Library, iVanity Fair, Elle/i, NPR, iThe Guardian/i, iThe Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar/i, iFinancial Times/i, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, iVulture/i, iThrillist/i, iVice/i, iSelf/i, Electric Literature, and Shelf AwarenessbrbrA novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.br/b brAlmost 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.  br  br iReal Life/i 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.