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This Issue 03/25/2010

• All Dried Up
• Toasts & Roasts: 03.25.10
• Readers Corner: Spring Has Sprung
• Civil Disobedience

Spring is in the air and so is the itch to read. When the warm weather rolls around, there’s nothing more comforting than lying in the grass with a good book. These two picks satisfy the intellectual craving that pleasure reading often provides.

Shock and awe fit for today's teenage wasteland: Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor.

There is something oddly therapeutic about reading a collection of short stories that tackle those plaguing issues — of familial obligations, health issues and relationship struggles, to name a few — by exploring their manifestation in mundane quotidian life. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, the debut short-story collection from Justin Taylor is a prime example of a book of this form. Because Taylor himself is so young, only 27, these stories focus on mostly teenagers and young adults and the unique way in which members of this age group handle their problems. As a result, his subjects become his target audience, as he engages his readers with warped images of themselves.

The heart and soul of this collection lies in the characters it portrays. There is the fifteen-year-old who, upon reconciling with his childhood best friend, finds himself simultaneously infatuated with him and his old friend’s older sister. Kyle is a student in junior college who has been offered a small stipend to kill his cousins’ cat, Buckles, because he has recently and inextricably become “stressed out“ and “lonesome.” The anarchists are a group of friends who have formed a band, living under aliases intended to reflect the great international anarchists of history, who burn books and steal, all while grappling with emotions and aspirations.

While these characters are riddled with intricacies that are entirely unique and oftentimes bizarre, their stories lend themselves to very real ideas and messages. Perhaps the most profound story is only four short pages in length. It is written in a form of sci-fi/fantasy barely present throughout the rest of the collection that narrates a negotiation of a contractual change to more greatly benefit angels. However, the transaction requires a sort of balancing out of affairs, which leads to the death of the protagonist's girlfriend. After her death, the angels simply depart, leaving a confused pseudo-widower confused and with a corpse. The only person who stays behind to help is Satan himself.