Bad Stories

AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS, CANDYFREAK AND AGAINST FOOTBALL • In the BESTSELLING, BAD STORIES, Steve Almond will help you understand, What the hell just happened to our country? 

"I was enlightened and spellbound by Bad Stories, outraged and consoled."—Cheryl Strayed • "A welcome change of pace from its mostly wonky competitors."—Washington Post • "Unfold some timely insights and avenues into the despair stalking American public life."—Publishers Weekly • "Almond holds up literature as a guide through America’s age-old moral dilemmas and finds hope for his country in family, forgiveness, and political resistance."—Booklist Online

Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn’t just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond’s effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices—from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin—to help explain the roots of our moral erosion as a people.

The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press into a for-profit industry, our enduring pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at providing clarity. It’s the book you can pass along to an anguished fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what the just hell happened to our country.