Customer Reviews

Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This collection of shorts from an incredibly talented twenty-seven year old shows so much promise that it almost carries you over the spots where you can't help but notice yourself reading a twenty-seven year old's first collection of shorts. Writing with a spare, slective pen, Justin Taylor could turn out to be a major voice - even in the most lackadaisical of the stories here he can turn out a lean, unexpected sentence that just takes your breath away. He captures the disaffected voice of young people on the brink of no longer being young unlike anybody I've read in the last couple years. If that voice isn't always in service of the most propulsive narrative, it hardly seems the point. This guy is someone to watch.

Justin Taylor's debut collection of stories seems to be guided by some universal list of all things hipster and disaffected. The Pixies are namechecked, we're treated to the namedropping of Trotsky and Derrida. The fifteen stories are the lives of young Floridians and Manhattanities, endlessly aimless, and oblivious to the world beyond them.

It's such a package of hipsterism that the collection itself nearly becomes meta, the epitome of Taylor's description of Hot Topic packaging the conformist lifestyle, in "Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit," where a woman muses on her Che Guevera-shirt wearing adolescence:

They commodified her emotions, sold her own rebellion back to her before she even knew it for what it was."

But then a phrase like the above occurs and you can appreciate why Taylor receives so much acclaim. He can write. The characters of the stories aren't exactly likable, but it's Taylor's ability to turn a phrase that has you rooting for them, feeling for them, pitying them, even as they engineer their self-destruction. His characters are flawed and everything in them is great: they know and celebrate these flaws, as in "The New Life," Brad recounts his nerdy friend Kenny who "languished on the one rung of the social ladder I knew was above," only to see his once wallflower friend a handsome and popular ninth grader. Left in the shadows and torn between a love for Kenny and Kenny's twin sister, he turns to black magic assisted by a friend.

Sometimes we aren't watching a character's destruction, but their awakening of their own frailty, such in "Finding Myself."

I keep finding myself in places I don't expect me, such as outside churches, lurking, peering in their dooryards, or inside my own hollow skull, living a life to which the term hardscrabble might be astutely or ironically applied."

Not all of the stories worked for me, but even in those that didn't, there was a sentence that struck me with its unabashed nature, or beauty. I was intrigued especially by the number of stories taking place in Florida. As a Florida native, I could recognize the desperation and bleak one can feel in small towns; it's palpable.

This isn't really a book for teens. There's some graphic imagery (snippets of the Abu Ghraib accounts) and sexual material, but for twenty-somethings, this collection will not only package their disenchantment with the world, but enlighten it too.

I ordered this collection on an impulse based on some excellent early previews - and was shocked to find it actually living up to the praise. This is an amazing debut collection of short stories about contemporary young lives in America. Most of the characters are in their teens or twentysomethings, the plots ramble and are often not the point at all, and it's hard to summarize most of the stories. But that's precisely the beauty and charm of these stories. They're beautifully written, with lucid honesty, a baring of emotions and insights, throwaway lines that leave you with a sudden frisson of shocked delight. To me the greatest pleasure came from reading something so contemporary, so honest and "now", that's also so good.

This is a short book, less than 190 pages, and there's not a single boring page or line in the entire book. The last time I read a single author collection and came away this impressed, it was Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. The time before that it was Rohinton Mistry's Tales from Phirozeshah Baug (published in the US as Swimming Lessons). Both those books and authors went on to garner major acclaim and success. I hope Justin Taylor achieves some modicum of that success and continues to produce books this luminous, well written and insightful about contemporary young American lives.

I would recommend this to anyone who loves good writing. Additionally, I would highly recommend it to young adults who find most realistic fiction boring and prefer to burrow deeper into the morass of speculative trash that fills the chain stores these days. Give them this book - be warned if you're easily offended because it contains some passing descriptions of explicit sex and language - and see them realize that literature can be contemporary and good books don't have to be about young wizards or shirtless vampires.

(PS: I came back to add briefly that for some reason this collection put me in mind of another favorite, Adrian Tomine's Summer Blonde. There's no direct correlation, except perhaps that they're both collections of short stories about young persons in contemporary American cities and share a masterful ability to capture the ennui and angst of young lives. Summer Blonde happens to be a B&W graphic novel but is no less literary.)

An uneven collection which nonetheless demonstrates good deal of latent talent. Actually, one can discern a good ear for detail, irony and dark humor that will serve this author well as his writing style developes further.

This collection of stories is not uplifting. It is not a "feel good" book. But it is very, very well-written. Taylor writes in sparse language more akin to Hemingway than Dickens but not really like any author I've read before. He captures the hopeless wanderings of his young characters and gives us snapshots of their aimless lives. Some of the stories are very short - just a few pages - like they are just the flicker of an idea of a story. Others are a bit longer and delve further into the lives of the characters.

My favorite story is one of the shortest: A guy plays Tetris while Armageddon rages outside. While trying to beat level eighteen for the first time, he must decide whether to wake the girlfriend sleeping next to him before the world ends or let her sleep through it.

The only thing that struck me as odd was that almost all of the stories mention Florida - they either take place there or have characters from Florida. Now, I love Florida - it's my newest home, but it was weird that it was mentioned in every story. I must assume that Taylor grew up there despite the lack of any reference in his bio.

Taylor is obviously a talented young writer and I am looking forward to his future work.

of impeccable writing and charmingly earnest characters. These stories are incredibly well-crafted and easy to love -- in fact, impossible not to love. After the first reading I knew there were going to be many more; this is one of those books you keep forever and return to often. I've already lent my copy to numerous friends and bought several more.

Justin Taylor's collection of short stories is a vivid debut for the young New York based writer and editor. I had this book on my desk for months, and I think maybe its Raymond Carveresque title allowed it to slip to the bottom of the pile, for how many times have we read books with whole sentences for their titles, and how often have they been disappointments. (Offhand I can't think of a good one since Malone Dies, and even that would have been better with another title.) But finally I got to the bottom of the stack and started this one with trepidation, well not so much actual fear, since several writers I respect have gone to bat for the author, and so it proved. Taylor is exceedingly talented and his mind is a profligate one, and some of the stories in the collection are so good I wish I had written them myself.

His strengths are several. There's the ear for dialogue that, even when it's not "realistic" per se, has a vitality and friskiness that makes the reader want to know more about the speakers. There's a sense of place, often in NYC or Florida settings, that's palpable, that becomes, as they say in MFA workshops, almost another character in the story, There's an erotic component to his fiction, which is great, he's not afraid of sex as so many young writers seem to be today. And as I say, his imagination seems to know now bounds: he wants to try out new things all the time. The stories are brief, leave you wanting more which is a good thing, for it's the longer stories, for the most part, that are the most problematic, and thus they're like the weather here in San Francisco or the buses in London, if you don't like the one you're in, get out and there'll be another in a few minutes. Some of the stories here just knocked me out with their invention, flair, and emotional resonance. He cares about his characters, even the dumbest and most venal, and even if few of them wind up happier or wiser, they have been molded and zapped into life with a feeling I can safely compare to love.

"In My Heart I Am Already Gone" is the story of a bright boy who lets his interest in a young cousin get the upper hand, even while he accepts a commission from her father to kill her pet cat. I know, I was all upset about having to read a story in which a cat gets killed, but it seems almost that the psychic karma of narrative steps in and applies justice all around. Heartbreak too. "The New Life" involves some Charles Burns-esque teens, largely losers, two of whom break free and swim into the upper reaches of middle school popularity, leaving their friends to wallow in envy. "Tennessee" is a little bit like Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg," and I learned many Jewish expressions and ways of arguing from it.

A few stories feel more like mood pieces written to attempt a prose poem vibe and a few are honorable flops. Some of the stories are linked up in complicated ways, including a couple of unsatisfactory passes at an anarchist commune run by a vixen that would be an ideal part for Michelle Rodriguez. I wondered also at the bisexual motif running through the book: it comes from a murky place in these guys' lives to surface at inappropriate times, exactly the way alcoholism used to steer Richard Yates' stories of promising junior execs ruining themselves at the office Christmas party by taking that one drink too many. And yet after reading the whole collection I have to tell you, there's no fiction writer I know with more promise, and more daring, than Justin Taylor right at this minute.