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My shpiel
Before Justin Taylor was best known as the author of Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, a new short fiction collection so fine it has spurred no less than than The New York Times Book Review to declare him 'a new voice that readers — and writers, too — might be seeking out for decades to come', he was already a daring editor (The Agriculture Journal, The Apocalypse Reader), one of the founding hosts and major voices of HTMLGIANT, a very widely published critic, fiction writer, and poet -- I was fortunate to have one of his stories in the Userlands anthology I edited for LHotB -- and, to bring it all back home, one of the original distinguished locals, having graced the comments area of this blog since the second or third day of its existence. Justin is currently working on a novel, co-editing (with Eva Talmadge) The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide (forthcoming from Harper Perennial), and a whole lot more.
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Further
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Interview
from an interview with Justin Taylor
(entirety @ Bomb)
Ben Mirov: While reading Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, it occurred to me that you’re the type of writer that is able to crystallize a lot of influences in your prose. I know you’re a fan of Donald Barthelme, but I expected to see more of his influence in BTE. Were there specific writers that you drew from while writing BTE?
Justin Taylor: Absolutely. I think influence is a fascinating and powerful thing. I know some writers fear or are wary of it, but I’m an eager embracer of models and anti-models, both. Sometimes it’s about saying “Okay, I love this, and it’s monumental, but it’s been accomplished already.” I do love Barthelme enormously, and I’ve learned volumes from reading him, but I’m not going to match Barthelme at writing Barthelme stories, and even if I could, what would be the point? So I’m not worried about following in his footsteps, or appearing to, because my work is never going to look like his. It’s about extrapolating a lesson, or picking up a technique, or having an idea of your own sparked by some idea you’ve encountered, and then putting those things to work in a wholly other context, the means to different ends of your own devising, where they may or may not even be recognizable anymore. I love the idea of building my nest from bits pinched from all over the place. If someone looks at my work and recognizes that this twig is from a birch tree, or that that bright red thing is a torn piece of label from a soda bottle—more power to that person for their good eye, but that doesn’t make it any less my nest.
BM: I was thinking, and I’m not sure how to put this in question form, that your writing reminds me of John Hughes’ movies in a number of ways, specifically the way you capture and articulate stereotypes of the ’90s and the way your characters are often in periods of transition or liminality. Many of the characters in BTE are hybrid goth, raver, nerd types, or just simply outsiders that are struggling for acceptance or love or friendship. Am I way off base in making this comparison?
JT: When I was growing up I was fascinated by people who seemed to fit snugly into their little sub-culture. They seemed like these great actors—not in the sense of being poseurs, but in the sense of knowing their lines, and their costumes, and being really comfortable in their roles, and expert at performing them. I never once felt that way in my whole life—I still don’t. And I’m sure those people weren’t really the way I imagined them; they were struggling to define themselves and live up to their own definitions as much as anyone else was—which is what I’m interested in exploring in the book. I hope I’m not just trading in stereotypes. But I think it would have been impossible to write about the ’90s without making reference to that kind of pathological typing, because it was such a fundamental part of how the culture articulated itself during that era.
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Media
JT reading “I See Tiny Mouths” by Anthony McCann
JT a.o. @ Poets & Writers Magazine Literary Trivia Party
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Bonus Feature
from Big-League Doom: Stephen King's Apocalypses
by Justin Taylor
(lifted from Powells)
Stephen King was my first literary hero. He made me want to be a writer. His work has been of such monumental significance to me that it's difficult to put my feelings into words — though in a minute or so I'm going to try. Even his worst — or anyway my least favorite — of his works are forever ingrained in my mind. It caused me no small amount of anguish to have King erroneously affiliated with my project (The Apocalypse Reader), and then to have to write the letters correcting that mistake.
... A few sentences back, I alluded to King's "best" and "worst" writing. The word "best" will come up again several times. The word "worst" will not. I have long felt that there is at least one good and important critical treatise to be written about Stephen King, his vast and varied body of work. This essay is not that treatise. I have come today to praise, not bury. This is a love letter.
... Like all King's best work, "The Mist" is delivered in direct, unadorned prose that doesn't want to mediate your experience so much as allow you to forget that there is anything between you and the story. Unlike Lovecraft, whose painfully self-conscious efforts to write capital-L Literature seem to succeed against the author's own instincts (and sometimes don't succeed at all), King's aggressive demotic functions like a movie screen, or better yet: the projector. Also unlike Lovecraft — an anti-democratic racist xenophobe who thought sex was gross — King's work is informed by an earthy politics of inclusion; a backyard barbecue materialism that hasn't forgotten its working-class roots, no matter how big the backyard has gotten over the years. Maybe this is why he's so good with crowds and groups. If so, I think it also explains why his work has stayed so popular — and so powerful — for so long. Certainly, it's one of my favorite things about his writing. He is a spectacular creator — and destroyer — of entire worlds.
(read the entirety)
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The book
'Each story in this crystalline, spare, oddly moving collection cuts to the quick. Taylor′s characters are guided by delusions and misapprehensions that quickly bring them to impasses with reality. Moving through this collection the reader will meet a young man who has reasoned away certain boundaries in relation to his budding, girl cousin; a high schooler whose desire to win back his crush leads him to experiment with goth magic; a man whose girlfriend is stolen by angels; and a Tetris player who, as the advancing white wall of the Apocalypse slowly churns up his driveway, decides that Death is a kindness.
'Fearless and funny, Taylor imagines this and more, in a collection that paints a dark picture of his generation -- one that is upwardly mobile yet adrift, fumbling for connection but hopelessly self-involved. And it′s all held together by a thread of wounding humor and candid storytelling that marks Taylor as a distinct and emerging literary talent.' -- Harper Collins
Excerpt/story:
Tennessee
My little brother Rusty was on the back porch, lighting up.
“Hey,” he said.
“Rusty,” I said. “The smoking.”
“This is what Mom and Dad made you come home for? To try some weird bonding shit against my smoking?”
“They didn’t make me come home. It was a choice. I wanted to come.”
“Ran out of money, you mean.”
“What’s with the smoking?”
“Do you know how many Jews there are at my high school?” Rusty said.
What happened is the family moved because my father lost a job and my mother got one. They left Miami, where we had always lived, and came to this suburb of Nashville. I think they picked it because it had the good school system for my brother, who hates his full name, Russell, and so goes by Russ in all circles except the family, where he has always been and will always be Rusty. Everyone agrees the move was hardest on him—especially him. Me, I say what’s one suburb to another? We didn’t actually live in Miami. Not like South Beach, Calle Ocho, and everything. We lived in a middle-class suburb called North Miami Beach, in the shadow of a wealthier suburb called Aventura, with the real city somewhere maybe half an hour south. These places were all part of the “greater Miami area,” which was understood to be among the biggest Jewish communities in the country. Fourth biggest, people always said, though I don’t know where they came by that number or who was in the top three. I was ten years old before I made a non-Jewish friend. (Her name was Marie Hahna and I fell right in love.)
“How many Jews are there at your high school?” I asked my brother.
“Eleven,” he said. “And three of them are done after this year.”
“Wow.”
“You know what I heard one kid say to another?”
“What?”
“Three down, eight to go.” Rusty smiled, a pleasureless near-grimace. He drew smoke and then blew it out slowly. It hung close about him like a morning mist.
“Oh come on, they didn’t.”
“Did.”
“And this is a reason to smoke?”
*
Rusty’s more right than he knows, about why I’m home. Or maybe he knows exactly how right he is and I’m the one who doesn’t know.
When I called to ask for a little helping hand my father wouldn’t even get on the phone, though I could hear him in the background. Boy, could I ever. Shouting and shouting. My mother, though no less disapproving, fostered a sort of muted respect for the time I had spent—in her words—finding myself.
She sent the money. Here I am.
*
In Miami, where everyone was a Jew, you didn’t think about it. It didn’t matter. It was assumed. You put in your time: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. Drone along with the congregation, slur the memorized phonetic Hebrew. Hello, Mrs. Nussbaum—mazel tov about your daughter. Forget black hats, wigs, holes in the sheet. We were Hannukah-and-lox Jews, not the Kashrut-and-Shabbos kind. But now we lived in a city with a mere four thousand Jews and a paltry three synagogues (my mother’s figures). So my parents were finding themselves, making cultural overtures, like enrolling my brother in Youth Group and buying the Schindler’s List deluxe box with the director’s cut and survivor interviews.
Through some program at their new synagogue they had donated a small but not miserly sum to aid Jewish “settlers” in Israel, a designation I took strong issue with. Soon enough my father and I were standing on opposite sides of the kitchen table, on the edge of a blowout over Palestine.
“That bastard,” my father said. “The one you read. That Chomsky, that—Jew-hating bastard!”
“Chomsky’s Jewish,” I said.
“A self-hating Jew, maybe,” he said. “Like you.”
“Hey,” I said. “I don’t hate myself, or the Jews. Now, what the Israeli government does on the other hand . . . I don’t see how hating that or them has anything to do with Elijah, the fifth commandment, or us.”
“Have you read the Dershowitz editorial I forwarded you? It explains everything. Everything.”
The kitchen window looked out on the deck and there was Rusty, his back to the house, smoking. His friend Dara was there, too, facing us, maybe even watching us through the window? I wondered if she could she hear the fight. Dara was the prized only child of someone important at the synagogue. Her roots went back to its founding in 1843. My parents viewed the friendship as a profitable one. I wondered if she thought I was winning the argument.
“Dershowitz,” I said. “Now there’s a right-wing SOB I want to listen to. He’s pro-torture, for the love of—”
“He’s Jewish, at least,” said my father. “You should hear the voice of your own people sometime. Might wake you up.”
“CHOMSKY IS JEWISH!” I said. “Remember ‘self-hating’?”
“Stop this,” my mother said. We paused. “You two are here all day while your brother is at school and I’m working, and my parents are coming in at one o’clock on Wednesday.”
We greeted this information with silence, my father especially.
“Therefore,” she continued, “one of you will have to pick them up. Or you can both go. To be honest, I don’t care. Just get them here.”
(continued)
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