Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

by Steve Almond

Overview

“Almond draws on everything from The Grapes of Wrath to the voting practices of his babysitter to dismantle the false narratives about American democracy.” —Cheryl Strayed, international-bestselling author of Wild
 
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 hell happened to our country.
 
“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597092234
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	09/30/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Steve Almond is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times–bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His short stories have been anthologized widely, in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He teaches at the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard, and hosts the New York Times podcast “Dear Sugars” with fellow writer Cheryl Strayed.

Read an Excerpt

FROM BAD STORIES

This book originally carried a different (and rather more grandiose) subtitle: "Toward a Unified Theory of How It All Came Apart." I ultimately chose a simpler phrase, one that captures something of the bewildment and exasperation so many Americans feel. But I mention that first subtitle to emphasize the nature of my undertaking. I’m not offering a single theory, or even a set of theories, as to how our democracy fell apart. I’m working toward a synthesis of theories. The ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency is certainly the impetus for this investigation. But it should not be mistaken for my subject.

In fact, I’ve been tracking the odd and lurching course of our democracy for most of my adult life. I’ve pursued this interest not as an academic—an historian or a political scientist—but as a reporter and, more recently, a fiction writer. That makes me a storyteller technically, though I feel more often like a woozy and puzzled student of the American story.

I’ve placed my faith in stories because I believe them to be the basic unit of human consciousness. The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, are what allow us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience. Only through the patient interrogation of these stories can we begin to understand where we are and how we got here.

Editorial Reviews

12/11/2017
Almond (Against Football) delivers a worthwhile foray into understanding and responding to the Trump era from a liberal perspective. To this end, he examines misconceptions, or “bad stories,” he sees as contributing to the debasement of American civic discourse, such as “economic anguish fueled Trumpism” or “there is no such thing as fair and balanced.” What has “come apart” for Almond is a serious commitment to the work of a liberal democracy. Instead, he sees the right and left relegating politics to the realms of, respectively, horror film (in alarmist Fox News stories) and farce (on the Daily Show). A major touchstone for Almond’s analysis is Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which now seems clairvoyant, he observes, about America’s “descent into triviality” via mass media. Taking storytelling as a basic human need, Almond’s commendable goal is to make room for the invention of better stories that draw on humanity’s finer instincts: generosity over greed, patience or curiosity over blind loyalty or rage. Notwithstanding the author’s own occasional one-sidedness, especially in too-pat psychologizing of Clinton opponents and Trump supporters, these essays unfold some timely insights and avenues into the despair stalking American public life. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

It’s a rare writer who has the power to make one aware in every paragraph of the moral necessity of literature, but in Bad Stories, Steve Almond has done just that. With fierce intelligence, moving candor, and dazzling insight, Almond draws on everything from The Grapes of Wrath to the voting practices of his babysitter to dismantle the false narratives about American democracy that got us into the political pickle we’re in. I was enlightened and spellbound by Bad Stories, outraged and consoled. This is a profound and essential book for all time, but especially for now.
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild

Steve Almond['s]...book is notable not so much for advancing new ideas but for synthesizing almost every major argument about what ails our country—including, among much else, racism, xenophobia and rampant economic inequality—and for offering a response to each. Almond is staunchly progressive, and the finished product, if often one-sided, nevertheless combines 'statistical data, personal anecdote, cultural criticism, literary analysis, and when called for, outright intellectual theft' into a whole that is lively, stimulating and pleasantly discursive ... Almond is an excellent prose stylist, and his book is a welcome change of pace from its mostly wonky competitors, though its reliance on literary models can induce the occasional eye roll ... And while his digressive style is one of the book’s greatest pleasures, it also makes it difficult to draw any single, unified conclusion from these essays—beyond, perhaps, the general belief that we should take participatory democracy more seriously and go about it with a bit more empathy.
—Chris Carroll, Washington Post

Taking storytelling as a basic human need, Almond’s commendable goal is to make room for the invention of better stories that draw on humanity’s finer instincts: generosity over greed, patience or curiosity over blind loyalty or rage. Notwithstanding the author’s own occasional one-sidedness, especially in too-pat psychologizing of Clinton opponents and Trump supporters, these essays unfold some timely insights and avenues into the despair stalking American public life.
—Publishers Weekly

Bad Stories is a huge, readable 237-page revelation of profound insights gleaned from connecting dots that we-the-people largely prefer not to see.
—Betsy Robinson, Notes from a Crusty Seeker

With the same biting wit that marks Almond’s previous books of social criticism ... he casts equal blame on both the left and the right, bitingly criticizing, for example, liberal comedians such as Jon Stewart and Bill Maher for making light of Trump while basking in their glowing reviews. 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.
—Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist Online

From the Publisher