When you’re young, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

“I began to believe that we were the secret owners of the world and everything in it,” says the Floridian narrator of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever’s first story. He happily lists the properties that belong in his world. “Our shitty rental home; that one bar on Tenth that we liked; the whole state from the Alabama border over to St. Augustine, down past the Rat Kingdom all the way to Hemingway House and the beaches from which you can practically spit on Cuba.” Those are narrow borders for the world, but they’re carefully tailored to the character. By the story’s end in just a flash of a few pages, you’re left with the same disappointing realization that’s lingering unspoken in the narrator’s gut — the world is much, much larger.

At 27, author Justin Taylor is young enough to be one of the wide-eyed characters populating his debut story collection, but Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever isn’t written with the blinders of youthful idealism. Taylor clearly grasps the limitations and failings of adolescent thinking. His characters are meticulously developed but artfully flawed twentysomethings. They argue authoritatively about music history and quote verbatim from their favorite books while hopelessly watching their own lives spiral out of control.

Taylor might be best known for his contributions to HTMLGiant, a literary blog edited by Atlanta’s Blake Butler and written by a number of young authors around the country. They’ve cultivated a fervent community while championing small-press books and occasionally worshipping at the altar of stylish icons like Gordon Lish or Dennis Cooper.

To his credit, Taylor’s stories are stylistically more conservative than his peers. He doesn’t bother mimicking Beckett’s formal experiments or gutting his sentences into imitations of Diane Williams’ skeletal prose, though both authors have clearly informed his work. Instead, Everything Here wisely focuses on Taylor’s strengths — setting vivid, realistic scenes and putting fleshed out characters in those scenes to fuck up.