A few questions with Justin Taylor

Spend a few minutes talking with Justin Taylor and you’ll notice a few things. First off, he’s pretty young to be the author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, a book filled with stories so clean and focused that they could have been the product of decades of work. The second thing you’ll noticed is that his age isn’t really the point - Taylor is just a smart guy who sees the world in insightful terms, whether he’s parsing Dennis Cooper’s narrative techniques or reminiscing about punk houses in Florida. Between teaching the occasional class at Rutgers and working on an upcoming novel, Taylor is a regular contributor at HTMLGiant, a literary blog edited by Atlanta’s Blake Butler.

Taylor read from Everything Here at A Cappella Books last night. We caught up with him to ask a few questions about the book and hear what’s next for this promising voice.

The places in Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever line up with a few places you’ve lived over the years. Do you draw much from an autobiographical impulse?

I’m certainly not above it, but it’s not the primary impulse. I do like writing from a sense of place, though, so a lot of the stories are autobiographical in that way – I grew up in South Florida, I live in New York now, I went to school in Gainesville, I spent some time in Oregon. I like writing about places where I don’t have to wonder how far apart the neighborhoods are or what the streets look like.