All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessionals; and stories are told and retold, held out by people stumbling towards one another in the dark. Frightening, hilarious, filled with raging impotence and moments of embattled grace, All We Want is Everything is the advent of a tremendous new literary voice.
Andrew Sullivan wields his prose swiftly, expertly, slicing away all soft flesh and precious angles to get to the hidden marrow of his characters' unquiet lives and then, when all seems hopeless, twists the knife slightly toward a momentary tenderness that’s even more startling. All We Want is Everything is an unnerving, discomfiting, totally original debut.