Flings - by Justin Taylor (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The acclaimed author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and The Gospel of Anarchy makes his hardcover debut with a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity.

In a new suite of powerful and incisive stories, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures.

A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car, and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from--and back toward--each other by the choices they make. A boy's friendship with a pair of identical twins undergoes a strange and tragic evolution over the course of adolescence. A promising academic and her fiancée attempt to finish their dissertations, but struggle with writer's block, a nasty secret, and their own expert knowledge of Freud.

From an East Village rooftop to a cabin in Tennessee, from the Florida suburbs to Hong Kong, Taylor covers a vast emotional and geographic landscape while ushering us into an abiding intimacy with his characters, Flings is a commanding work of fiction that captures the contemporary search for identity, connection, and a place to call home.

Review Quotes

Praise for Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: "This spare, sharp book--Taylor's debut collection--documents a deep authority on the unavoidable confusion of being young, disaffected and human ... 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 (Editor's Choice)
"These short fictions by Justin Taylor give such a convincing account of the rough crossing of young adulthood that they practically induce seasickness. For his youthful protagonists, identity---emotional, intellectual, sexual--is unstable, constantly in motion." - Boston Globe
"Justin Taylor's Flings offer lasting pleasure." - Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
"Many clichéd things can be said of the stories in Justin Taylor's new collection, Flings. They're hilarious and heartbreaking; there's an existential loneliness to their characters; there's a stark beauty in their sentences. But these sentiments smooth over the messy truths that Taylor works with-he's managed to gather up all the confusion, repressed aggression, and misplaced acceptance of growing up in the nineties and becoming a young adult in the twenty-first century." - Andrew Jimenez, Paris Review
"These are characters that surprised me when reading the book: the ways in which they come together, the ways in which they evolve, the ways in which they hold true to principles or abandon them or jettison elements of their life because of them. That blend of groundedness and unpredictability ultimately creates a fantastic sense of the unexpected in Flings." - Vol 1 Brooklyn
"In this luminous collection of short stories, Taylor takes on the theme of constancy of self amid the ephemeral relationships that make up our lives.These stories, by turns witty and piercing, form an uncommon portrait of the human heart." - Publishers Weekly starred review
"I tore through this book with white knuckles and a sense of relief, grateful to finally learn more about the human condition from an author willing to give it to me straight. Taylor is a brilliant writer who can tell it like it is without sacrificing style, humor, or surprise." - Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa
"Infused with pop-culture and literary references alike, Taylor's profoundly understated and often funny stories establish him as an unequivocal voice for the Internet age." - Booklist
"Taylor's insightful stories illuminate the many ways we fall in love--and out of it--and how romances shape our identity both while they last and long after they conclude." - Shelf Awareness
"At the root of Taylor's fiction is one the great ineffable questions, so simple as to come off almost silly when stated plainly--why are the current state of things one way rather than another? Unanswerable, of course, but this collection cements Taylor's status as a young writer to follow." - Daily Beast
"Justin Taylor's first two books-his debut story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy-were a one-two punch that had the literary world reeling. Taylor's latest short story collection, Flings, is the uppercut, establishing him as a compassionate yet unflinching writer who delves deeply into the lives of his characters and varied worlds they inhabit. - Buzzfeed
"It's an insane idea, but Taylor pulls it off. . . . [A] beautiful meeting of Don Delillo, Philip Roth and Aaron Cometbus." - Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children
"A brilliant debut novel you have to read." - Details