Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

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.

A collection of prophetic, provocative, and dazzlingly written stories by Justin Taylor, an important new voice in literary fiction and a new literary beast.

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.