Flings

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.