Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories
    Unavailable
    Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories
    Unavailable
    Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories
    Ebook169 pages2 hours

    Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories

    By Justin Taylor

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “This spare, sharp book—Taylor’s debut collection—documents a deep authority on the unavoidable confusion of being young, disaffected and human … the most affecting stories in Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever are as unpredictable as a careening drunk. They leave us with the heavy residue of an unsettling strangeness, and a new voice that readers—and writers, too—might be seeking out for decades to come.” — New York Times Book Review

    A collection of prophetic, provocative, and dazzlingly written stories by Justin Taylor, an important new voice in literary fiction and "a new literary beast." (Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood)

    Each story in this crystalline, spare, and moving collection cuts to the quick. Taylor’s characters are guided by misapprehensions that bring them to hilarious, often tragic impasses with reality. A high school boy's desire to win over a crush leads him to experiment with black magic. An assistant at a hedge fund is torn between the girl he loved in college and the older man whose attention he craves. A fast food employee preoccupied by Abu Ghraib grows obsessed with a co-worker. While his girlfriend sleeps, a Tetris player tries to beat his record, nevermind that out their window blazes the end of the world.

    Fearless and wild, the stories of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever are held together by a thread of wounding humor and candid storytelling that marks Taylor as a distinct and emerging literary talent.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 9, 2010
    ISBN9780061969447
    Unavailable
    Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories
    Author

    Justin Taylor

    Justin Taylor (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the executive vice president of book publishing and book publisher at Crossway. He has edited and contributed to several books, and he blogs at Between Two Worlds—hosted by the Gospel Coalition.

    Read more from Justin Taylor

    Related to Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Winslow, Kois, Tóibín, and More

      Jan 17, 2023

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new release titles from De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Dan Kois, Colm Tóibín, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to he

      7 min read

    • Article

      Sharon Van Etten

      Nov 18, 2022

      Sharon Van Etten
      11 min read

    • Article

      I Was a Public Schooler

      Jun 9, 2020

      The application to Waverley Glen Academy required that I spend a day sitting in on freshman classes and mixing with the student body to see how well I’d fit in. I was twelve. Picture the gleaming wooden corridors, the Persian rugs, the monogrammed si

      14 min read

    • Article

      Jenkins

      Feb 4, 2021

      Jenkins
      6 min read

    • Article

      Edith Wharton Will Teach You Everything You Need to Know About Naming Characters

      Sep 30, 2019

      Her 1905 classic The House of Mirth offers a masterclass in the art of character naming, from heroine Lily Bart to the seriously laughable Mrs. Peniston. The post Edith Wharton Will Teach You Everything You Need to Know About Naming Characters appear

      6 min read

    • Article

      Suicide Blonde at Twenty-Five

      Jun 7, 2017

      Suicide Blonde at Twenty-Five
      5 min read

    • Article

      Free as Aira

      Sep 1, 2017

      Free as Aira
      5 min read

    • Article

      If You Are Permanently Lost

      Dec 15, 2019

      I never have any idea where I am. I lived my whole childhood in the purple foothills of the same five-square-mile town and I still couldn’t tell you whether you turn left or right on the single thruway to get to the grade school or the grocery store,

      7 min read

    • Article

      Paul Tremblay

      Jun 17, 2020

      IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS that I would live to see the end of everything,” says Paul Tremblay, speaking to SFX from his Massachusetts home in the middle of lockdown. It’s a singularly peculiar time, and a peculiar interview for him to

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno

      Dec 12, 2019

      I am at this point in my life where I find these lists voluptuous brags about time, which I have surely been party to in the past. The post A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Something New

      Mar 1, 2018

      Something New
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Lost Bohemians

      Apr 29, 2021

      The Lost Bohemians
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium On The Mysterious

      Sep 1, 2023

      A Symposium On The Mysterious
      24 min read

    • Article

      My Son Is Undone by My Hair

      Dec 1, 2021

      I mean he buries his face in itand breathes it in, holds it with his little handlike an elephant as I carry himpost-nap, still halfway in a dream. I mean he asks to brush it, then doesfor ten minutes—hours at two—gently. Says again and again Mama,

      1 min read

    • Article

      Daring to Show My Dark Side

      Feb 12, 2024

      Daring to Show My Dark Side
      4 min read

    • Article

      Joseph Cassara Wants His Characters to Break Your Heart

      Feb 1, 2018

      The Puerto Rican drag queen is a recognizable personification of New York in the 1980s, the neighbor (and opposite) of the white, Gordon Gekko-style master of the universe with his slicked-back hair. In The House of Impossible Beauties, debut novelis

      12 min read

    Reviews for Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

    3.5/5

    27 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      I was extremely disappointed with this collection of short stories. They were written well, for the most part, but there was a lot of potential in them that was never quite realized.
    • 4/5
      "I could use another drink," she says. She only had a few before closing, and then one while she cleaned up. I say I'll have one too and she eyes me, deciding whether to start in on the question of if I need another. I don't, probably, no, I know I don't, but if she doesn't start in--she doesn't--I will have what I want, which is different from what I need: what a surprise.The characters in Justin Taylor's short story collection are generally young, working menial jobs and are definitely not hipsters living in Brooklyn. From a lonely teenage asked to do something unpleasant by the uncle who had welcomed him into his family, to a guy working at the deli counter who is involved with a married woman, each story looks at all the ways people connect and fail to connect with each other. As in any collection, some stories are better than others, but all are well-written and even the less successful stories are trying to do something interesting. Judge has nothing to do with this story. He wasn't even at home. We let ourselves in, swiped a six-pack from his fridge, and went back to Joe Brown's. Judge is simply a character on whom I can't help but dwell some. Something pulls my thoughts back his way. He inspires loathing so pure, to be silent about it seems no less a crime than denying love.
    • 5/5
      Sometimes you really want to hate a writer.For example, one reason to hate Justin Taylor is that his name is kinda like Justin Bieber's. The Justin part is the part that gets you. Also he's bound to be a quirky hysterical realist, which (I've always believed) is a trend today, especially among writers of my generation.Yet Justin Taylor's debut is strong, albeit a bit uneven at points. But Taylor, at 28, brings a maturity in short story composition--a type Carveresque minimalism--that should be envy of every writer. See, for example, the opening of "A House in Our Arms:""We made it to New York.That's how we put it when we talk about it with each other, even though it means something different to each of us, and even though we're both pretty used to it by now, I came straight from school, worked some crap jobs, then landed a decent one. It's at a hedge fund and I hate it, at least theoretically. In practice I find the more time I spend doing it the less I feel one way or the other. It's just what I'm doing, what I do. I work with nice enogh people. They started me out as an assistant but I'm already almost a junior manager. Who knows where I might wind up if I stick around?"Like Carver, Taylor's narrators are aware of their own life standings. Yet unlike Carver, his characters these are younger people, kids who made it out from college and don't know what to do. Yet again, like Carver, there is a strong sense of floating here: these are stories of people who had the bad end of the deal, trying to figure out what to do. It's about class, yet it's not just about class.It's concerns floating: the states in-between in a relationship and not, between going home and going to a new place, between the decision of going and staying. For example, in "A House In Our Arms," the narrator contemplates his sexual friendship with his lesbian best friend, while at the same time, sleeping with a man. In "Tennesse" the narrator ends up back with his parents' broken home (his father's lost his job) after trying to find himself and failing. In "Weekend Away" a woman runs away from her current lover after recieving (and not answering) a call from a former boyfriend; when she comes back she tells him: "I know you don't like hearing it but it's true, that's what I was thinking. There are so many places I've never even seen....So why can't I let myself say yes?"Taylor's world is a world of conflation as well. Violence and sexual desire are the same ("Jewels Flashing in the Night Time); there is a difference between sex with someone you love and someone you might love, but you're not going to do much about it--or there isn't much you can do about it ("Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit"). What is probably most refreshing about Taylor's writing is that he is fearless when it comes to sex. Compared to the male writers in Katie Rophie's essay, Taylor is pornographer: writing about bisexuality, threesomes, and phone sex; he writes it viscerally and with feeling.Of course, some might be turned off by this, as well as Taylor's possible use of bisexuality as a metaphor for general confusion, and some of his more experimental works--"Tetris" and "Finding Myself" are almost like prose poems, "Jewels Flashing in the Night Time" reminds me of Daniel Scott's "Fellow Feeling" (his only terrible story in his short story collection) but only slightly better done. Some of his stories also do what stories shouldn't (jumping point of view in "Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit," as one example), but Taylor proves to be a skilled writer: he pulls it all off. He makes it work. He'll remind you of Carver and Gaitskill, only younger, and not a drunk (not yet anyway) or a prostitute (again, not yet).At the end, I still hate Justin Taylor. He wrote the book I wanted to write, before I got it written, and he wrote it better than I could have. It is more than enough reason to hate Justin Taylor.
    • 3/5
      Really undecided about this book. I liked some of the stories, but some of them fell really flat for me. Some of the characters were from subcultures/mileus that I'm roughly familiar with, and they didn't ring true.Still, I'm excited to read Taylor's forthcoming novel, and I think the story about the cat is great.
    • 3/5
      I was browsing the new books section at my library and saw this book with a great title. I am normally not a huge fan of short story collections but there was one called Tetris...how bad could it be?For me, the most frustrating part about these stories can be summed up with two points: (1) In almost every story, the characters are the same and speak in nearly identical first person voice. Some variety would have been nice. (2) Nothing really happens to the characters. They don't really do anything other than drink, do drugs and have sex. There is no growth and boring characters stay boring.There were a few good/strange stories that broke the mold like "Tetris" and "Go Down Swinging" (the anarchists were the most interesting characters in the entire book) but most of the time, I was waiting for something interesting and hoping the next story would do it but then I ran out of stories.
    • 4/5
      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.