"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

"Whether Taylor is exploring youth, human bonds or fantastical scenarios, he displays a gift for illuminating the connections between the mundane and the grotesque." -- Time Out New York

"Justin Taylor is a master of the modern snapshot." -- Los Angeles Times

"In his first book of short stories, Taylor hones a dark-humored and character-themed collection in the tradition of Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior or Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son." -- Oxford American

"Beautiful lines leap from the pages, and we gladly enter Taylor's vivid world, even as it transforms what we know about ourselves and others into something slippery and ever-changing." -- Penthouse

"Taylor's characters would like for time to both speed up and slow down - an impossible, inevitable wish that makes the moments he captures worth savoring." -- BookForum

"Mr. Taylor has perfect touch, to frightening effect, does not presume, has power, and promises us new things. There is a debt paid to Donald Barthelme...and a strange undertow of Philip Roth, which makes for a new literary beast." -- Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood

"The characters in Justin Taylor's stories may be lost, unmoored, out of control, but their creator is astonishingly sure-handed. He unerringly locates the center of these centerless lives, and discerns the shape of their shapelessness." -- David Gates, author of Jernigan

"Taylor flirts with poetic