Kirjahaku

"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 ReviewA 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.

With wit, warmth, and remarkable insight, Taylor tracks the disillusionments and epiphanies of young punks living on the outskirts of Gainesville, FL. The home they share is a crumbling, one-story shack that contains their debauchery, affairs, theorizing, and eventual fiery transcendence. All of existence seems to pack itself within the walls of their hovel (except when it doesn't) as Taylor explores the boundaries (if there are any) between religion and politics, faith and fanaticism, and what happens when those boundaries break down. Taylor also produces a cultural portrait of late-90s America, of our pre-millennial anxiety, of our vague sense that the world would soon change forever.

The acclaimed author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and The Gospel of Anarchy makes his hardcover debut with a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity.In a new suite of powerful and incisive stories, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures.A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car, and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from--and back toward--each other by the choices they make. A boy's friendship with a pair of identical twins undergoes a strange and tragic evolution over the course of adolescence. A promising academic and her fianc e attempt to finish their dissertations, but struggle with writer's block, a nasty secret, and their own expert knowledge of Freud.From an East Village rooftop to a cabin in Tennessee, from the Florida suburbs to Hong Kong, Taylor covers a vast emotional and geographic landscape while ushering us into an abiding intimacy with his characters, Flings is a commanding work of fiction that captures the contemporary search for identity, connection, and a place to call home.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A raucous and wickedly smart satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture, following a washed-up actor on his quest to revive the cult TV show that catapulted him to teenage fame "A performance of wit and rigor"--New York Times Book Review David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, recovering alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot--not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence. Hollywood, the Internet, and a fractured nation have other plans, however, and David soon drinks himself to a realization: This seemingly innocuous revival of an old Buffy rip-off could be the spark that sets ablaze a nation gripped by far-right conspiracy, climate catastrophe, and mass violence. Reboot is a madcap speculative comedy for our era of glass-eyed doom-scrolling and Millennial nostalgia--and yet it's still full of heart. It's a tale of former teen heartthrobs, striving parents, internet edgelords, and fish-faced cryptids, for anyone who has looked back on their life and wanted--even if but for a moment--to hit "reset."

An acclaimed writer reckons with his relationship with his troubled father--an unflinching memoir in the tradition of Dani Shapiro, Maggie Nelson, and Daniel Mendelsohn When Justin Taylor was thirty, his father, Larry, drove to the top of an airport parking garage to take his own life. Thanks to the intervention of family members, he was not successful, but the incident would forever transform how Justin thinks of his father, and how he thinks of himself as a son. Moving back and forth in time from that day, Riding with the Ghost captures the past's power to shape, strengthen, and distort our visions of ourselves and each other. We see Larry as the middle child in a chilly Long Island family; as a beloved Little League coach who listens to kids with patience and curiosity; as an unemployed father struggling to keep his marriage together while battling long-term illness and depression. At the same time, Taylor explores how the work of confronting a family member's story forces a reckoning with your own. With raw intimacy, Riding with the Ghost lays bare the joys and burdens of loving a troubled family member. It's a memoir about fathers and sons, teachers and students, faith and illness, and the complicated legacy that each generation hands down to the next.

An unflinching memoir from a writer reckoning with his relationship with his troubled father and the complicated legacy that each generation hands down to the next "Justin Taylor's relentless, peripatetic, and tender search for reconciliation with his late troubled father blooms into a full-throated song of joy about his own life lived through music, teaching, travel, and literature."--Lauren Groff, author of FloridaNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS When Justin Taylor was thirty, his father, Larry, drove to the top of the Nashville airport parking garage to take his own life. Thanks to the intervention of family members, he was not successful, but the incident forever transformed how Taylor thinks of his father, and how he thinks of himself as a son. Moving back and forth in time from that day, Riding with the Ghost captures the past's power to shape, strengthen, and distort our visions of ourselves and one another. We see Larry as the middle child in a chilly Long Island family; as a beloved Little League coach who listens to kids with patience and curiosity; as an unemployed father struggling to keep his marriage together while battling long-term illness and depression. At the same time, Taylor explores how the work of confronting a family member's story forces a reckoning with your own. We see Taylor as a teacher, modeling himself after his dad's best qualities; as a caregiver, attempting to provide his father with emotional and financial support, but not always succeeding; as a new husband, with a dawning awareness of his own depressive tendencies. With raw intimacy, Riding with the Ghost lays bare the joys and burdens of loving a troubled family member. It's a memoir about fathers and sons, teachers and students, faith and illness, and the pieces of our loved ones that we carry with us always.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A raucous and wickedly smart satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture, following a washed-up actor on his quest to revive the cult TV show that catapulted him to teenage fame "A performance full of wit and rigor"--New York Times Book Review David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, recovering alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot--not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence. Hollywood, the Internet, and a fractured nation have other plans, however, and David soon drinks himself to a realization: this seemingly innocuous revival of an old Buffy rip-off could be the spark that sets ablaze a nation gripped by far-right conspiracy, climate catastrophe, and mass violence. Reboot is a madcap speculative comedy for our era of glass-eyed doom-scrolling and Millennial nostalgia. It's a tale of former teen heartthrobs, striving parents, internet edgelords, and fish-faced cryptids, for anyone who has looked back on their life and wanted--even if but for a moment--to hit "reset."

These are the ways the world ends. Thirty-four new and selected Doomsday scenarios: an enthralling collection of work by canonical literary figures, contemporary masters, and a few rising stars, all of whom have looked into the future and found it missing. Across boundaries of place and time, these writers celebrate the variety and vitality of the short story as a form by writing their own conclusions to the story of the world. Obliteration has never hurt so good. Contributors include Grace Aguilar, Steve Aylett, Robert Bradley, Dennis Cooper, Lucy Corin, Elliott David, Matthew Derby, Carol Emshwiller, Brian Evenson, Neil Gaiman, Jeff Goldberg, Theodora Goss, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jared Hohl, Shelley Jackson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stacey Levine, Tao Lin, Kelly Link, H.P. Lovecraft, Gary Lutz, Rick Moody, Michael Moorcock, Adam Nemett, Josip Novakovich, Joyce Carol Oates, Colette Phair, Edgar Allan Poe, Terese Svoboda, Justin Taylor, Lynne Tillman, Deb Olin, Unferth, H.G. Wells, Allison Whittenberg, and Diane Williams.

an the sisters crack the code in time to prevent the cyber-crime of the decade?