Justin Taylor's crystalline, spare, and oddly moving prose cuts to the quick. His characters are guided by misapprehensions that bring them to hilarious but often tragic impasses with reality: a high school boy's desire to win over a crush leads him to experiment with black magic, a fast-food employee preoccupied by Abu Ghraib becomes obsessed with a coworker, a Tetris player attempts to beat his own record while his girlfriend sleeps and the world outside their window blazes to its end. Fearless and astute, funny and tragic, this collection heralds the arrival of a unique literary talent.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Taylor's superb debut short story collection is explorative and fresh with well-crafted empathic characters. In A House in Our Arms, a young hedge fund assistant reconnects with his first love, Leah, in New York yet is drawn to Richard, an older man. Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit has proud regulars of a Lower East Side coffee house commenting on and criticizing the new bourgeois clientele as they watch the neighborhood change around them. In My Heart I Am Already Gone, gives narrator Kyle the unpleasant job of putting down his uncle's cat, Buckles, all the while feeling terror that he will never escape his hometown or his on again/off again girlfriend. Each story is spare and clean and speaks the truth in beautiful resonant prose. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Over half the stories in this collection were published in Internet literary magazines or in an anthology edited by Dennis Cooper. Short story lovers will enjoy Taylor’s talent for flash fiction as well as his adept touch with the longer lengths that give him scope for a weird, ironic sense of humor and profound taste for the bizarre—one reads, laughs, and shudders simultaneously. Taylor examines relationships through the prism of tactile memory while using voice and point of view to create both ambiguity and suspense. The stylistically complex Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time successfully conflates a painfully unrequited love, visions of torture at Abu Ghraib, and the narrator’s job as the meat slicer in a busy deli. In the flash fiction Tetris, a couple’s fight over the video game turns apocalyptic. And Uncle Danny pays his nephew $25 to kill the family cat in In My Heart I Am Already Gone. These stories of Gen Y, told with panache, dark humor, and technical flash, will delight short-fiction fans of all ages. --Ellen Loughran
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Almost,but no cigar,
By Astrogirl "MWA RWA" (Germany) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories (Paperback)
Justin Taylor's stories in this collection have a half-baked quality to them that left me cold. There is not a lot for the reader to connect with here. Settings are sparse and interactions are mostly unsatisfying and nobody really stands out enough to motivate page turning until the one nod to Barthelme;
"Finding myself". Barely two pages long it is hinted at on the cover of the paperback edition with a blurb from Padgett Powell. Perhaps the blurb is a debt paid to some connection of Powell's in the publishing industry? Do we really need more stories about people smoking pot,directionless teens during boring summer vacations and dysfunction in the male dynamic of suburban Jewish families? If so they need to have more impact and insight to be worth the cover price.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
I'm Not a Quitter.,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories (Paperback)
I am not a quitter, therefore, finished this book though somewhere around Chapter 4 became highly uninterested in the material.
I was unable to connect to any characters on a personal level, not because I didn't relate to then, but because Taylor lacks the ability to develop characters on a more intimate level. This is a book about 14 of the most boring people of the face of the planet- even though a few of them are supposedly tripping balls.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Review From Books & Wine,
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This review is from: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories (Paperback)
Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor, besides being a book with an incredibly long title, is a collection of short stories, basically about hipsters being unemployed doing unglamourous things. The book is small, topping off at 185 pages. The stories are gritty. Some I related with and some I did not.
Stylistically, Taylor is excellent. The words just seem to flow off the page. This book reminded me a bit of Chuck Palahniuk's writing. The people within are inherently flawed, I don't really care much for the characters, but I still want to know what happens because the words weave a spell. My favorite story within Everything Here is The Best Thing Ever was Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time which basically involves this guy playing Tetris during the apocalypse. Tetris plus world-ending gets a giant thumbs up from me. Aside from that, not much for me to say, as this was such a slim book without an overarching plot, or main characters. Just short stories, and if that's what you like, then I say, pick this book up. "It was so thorough, almost as if he were trying to say that if he could no longer work in an office then by God he would keep such a spotless and ordered home that the family would come to see how his lost job had been a good fortune in disguise." - pg. 47 Story of my life. I currently work one day per week as I'm waiting to hear back about being approved to sub, and my current job doesn't have the budget to give me more hours. Therefore, I clean and read all day. Seriously. "She is a magic trick and I am either the magician or the crowd" - pg. 155 Sparse, beautiful, me likey.
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