bwreads's review against another edition
5.0
I'm still reading these because I don't read a book of short stories the way I read a novel. (I will say that while I'm reading, it's hard not to go on to the next story as if it were the next chapter.) These stories are so vivid, I feel like I'm falling into Harry Potter's pensieve when I start one, and I come out startled and not sure where I am. I checked the book out from the library weeks ago, and I just can't bring myself to turn it in until I finish it.
leilaniann's review against another edition
1.0
This book was embarrassingly bad. There is a story about "anarchists" in here where this chick can't find one of her shoes, so a guy doesn't wear his shoes to the store "in solidarity." Barf. I had a friend come and remove it from the house so I wouldn't be compelled to waste my time on the last 80 pages.
aprilbooksandwine's review against another edition
3.0
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.
Read the rest of my review here
Read the rest of my review here
bookittome's review against another edition
3.0
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.
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.
heyvito's review against another edition
1.0
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.
booksellingandbagels's review against another edition
4.0
Dark, but written with something like sympathy. And the best book title around.
lilla75's review against another edition
1.0
Ugh. No thanks. I couldn't make it all the way through, honestly. If the first story wasn't bad enough (second person, mundane, generally unappealing, weak) I had to read about some gross guy vaguely sniffing his cousin's underwear after he drowns her cat. I felt icky and unsatisfied. Is this what the author was going for, that feeling of remorse you get after having a bad make out session with someone out of boredom? Well, maybe that's the whole damn point. But I don't want to revisit those kinds of moments in my life. I would sooner just read a good book.
trin's review
3.0
More short stories, of varying quality, and with many wandering into the dime a dozen, disaffected young hipster side of things. Yawn. But a couple of these were really good. I especially liked the apocalyptic Tetris story. With all the books, and specifically short story collections, that I read, I tend to feel pretty impressed if an author manages to write even one story that sticks with me so favorably. That's how I feel about this Tetris story. And, uh. That's not a sentence I get to write often.
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