In his debut Collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, Justin Taylor channels a few old chestnuts, (I’ve only just gotten started with this book) but it immediately impressed this reader with a nicely chiseled style that’s refreshingly “no bullshit”. There’s a hurricane lashing the coast, and Taylor’s narrator tells us about Amber, and some other girls, kissing, screwing, maybe hopeful screwing, and invents a deserted suburban landscape that is immediately recognizable. Amber stares out the window, so do we, of course this story is titled; Amber at the Window in Hurricane Season.
By the time you see what’s going on in the second story, In My Heart I Am Already Gone, and you witness it by
Continue reading Too young to be this good
JE: D.R. “Duke” Haney’s Banned for Life is a great sprawling coming-of-age, with all the pitch and velocity of a punk rock adolescence. Banned is also, along with Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, the most “lived in” novel I read last year, and one of the most under-read, in my estimation. Here’s Duke on the books he first fell in love with:
JR: There seems to be a kind of wild kinetic energy to Mr. Peanut, the debut novel coming this summer from Knopf. The author, Adam Ross is no where to be seen in these pages, which always signals to me that the trick has been achieved, there is no reveal, the illusion is complete, because you’re only watching the characters that all seem to be present, like they could be your next door neighbors, standing right next to you in line at the train station. I didn’t read any cliché’s in this novel; the dialogue is crisp, so much so, that I was emailing snippets of it to friends and co-workers as
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