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.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: Imagine the subtle domesticity of Raymond Carver's fiction crossed with the thematic ennui of Richard Linklater's film Slacker and you have something that resembles Justin Taylor's newest story collection, Flings. Readers familiar with Taylor's terrific debut, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, will find a similar focus on the uncertain lives of twenty- and thirty-somethings. These characters are not necessarily selfish (though some are); they're lost. But Flings is less about finding the way out--whether that's literal or figurative--and more about the intimate discovery that these lives are meandering in unknown directions. While Flings confronts ambiguous situations and characters with unclear motives, Taylor himself writes with resolve and confidence. It's his strongest work to date--delicately observed and slyly funny. --Kevin Nguyen

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