"It took someone as wizard-brained as Neely to crack the code on making literature as spastically gleeful as watching your favorite cartoon. This book doesn’t just make every other Grant biography obsolete, it renders History Itself an outmoded relic of the past." —Vernon Chatman, writer and producer of South Park and The Shivering Truth
"The funniest and weirdest take on the story of Ulysses S. Grant, who for the very first time has been rendered interesting. Move over, all those other biographies I've never actually read." —Jason Roeder, former senior editor of The Onion and author of Griefstrike! The Ultimate Guide To Mourning"The poetic parody of You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant hilariously cuts to the heart of America like Ken Burns and Robert Caro drunkenly trying to one-up each other. Brad Neely's ornate comedic voice is at its most confident, weaving a textured, ridiculous historical fiction that ends up looking a whole lot like the truth." —Jacob Oller, Paste Magazine
"Humor and history are words rarely uttered in the same breath but this genre-busting biography accomplishes the impossible, turning the life of Ulysses S Grant into a fun and funny beach read." —Leonard Mlodinow, New York Times-bestselling author of Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
"Brad Neely is a sort of folk hero for aughts-internet weirdos who searched for absurd comedy on the web and found his tall-tale rap about George Washington's two sets of testicles. Now he viciously parlays his obsessions with warped American history into this genre-defying novel that's nearly impossible to describe or put down. A meat-grinder of untrue facts and truer than true facts with jokes so dense you read past them for three seconds before pausing to reflect on how much of a dummy you were to miss them the first time. What the fuck is this book? I don't know, but I love it." —April Wolfe, screenwriter"This is fucking brilliant. Buy it. Funniest book I've read since John Bolton's The Room Where It Happened." —Mike Sacks, author of Randy, Passable in Pink, Passing on the Right,and Stinker Lets Loose!"It’s like discovering Blood Meridian typed neatly in the margins of your Gary Larson day calendar." —Ted Travelstead, author of The Petraeus Files and co-author of Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk
"This is what it would be like if Donald Barthelme were still alive and they taped an episode of Drunk History with him and just let the tape roll for twelve hours." —Kevin Hyde, McSweeney's contributor
"I’m not even kidding when I say I think we should recall the Golden Record and select all/paste over everything we think we can bear to share about humanity with a copy of You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant. Every single page, paragraph, and sentence of this encyclopedic, meta-satirical masterpiece reads like a tectonic plate of mythic gems, each hysterically imbued [with] so much life, lore, gore, war, mirth, and utter madness, it’s hard to imagine how he made it fit all in one spine. Stand aside, ye Future Evil AI Stepkids of Twain, Swift, Pynchon, Joyce, and [whoever wrote those doorstops they based the Harry Potter movies on]—Brad Neely just whipped y’all’s asses wearing nothing but his National Treasure-level brain." —Blake Butler, author of AAnnex, Three Hundred Million, and Molly
"Brad Neely is funny as hell. His comic and surreal alternative biography of Ulysses S. Grant reads like an epic episode ofDrunk History starring Thomas Pynchon. Get one copy of this hilarious and wise book for yourself, and one for your Civil War-buff dad." —J. M. Tyree, author of The Counterforce
"A hilarious and heartfelt American masterpiece—You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant is not only the funniest book I have ever read, it is also one of the most stirring. Neely transports readers from past to present and back again by such diverse means as Long John Silver's and references to David Lynch's Dune, all told via one of the most memorable comic voices this side of Twain. And like Twain, Neely uses his stylistic and comic gifts to reveal the best and worst of who we are as a nation—to call us to reckon with what we have done, and what we must face if we are ever to live up to our ideals. It's a remarkable reading experience, and a book I'll return to again and again. This country sure could use a Ulysses S. Grant right about now and Brad Neely has given us exactly the one we need.” —Kent Wascom, author of The New Inheritors and The Blood of Heaven
"The world might not need another biography of Ulysses S. Grant, the man who crushed the Confederacy, managed Reconstruction, became the first president to circumnavigate the globe, and died five days after finishing his memoir. But it does need Neely’s You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant, which has been likened to the long-running TV series Drunk History. It is an apt comparison, though a better one might be Beat poetry. See if you can hear echoes of Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs in these lines: 'Feel [Grant’s] time, with me, through him, as Our Hero once felt with his kit of bits. Get your own feelers out and spank up the blood so to bring in this tale’s sense-datum with your own ripened, blushing body.' Neely is loose with the facts, as when he depicts Kit Carson as young Grant’s idol—Carson didn’t become famous until the early 1840s, when Grant was an adult—but that hardly matters in a book subtitled 'A Farcical Biography,' which demands that its reader do little more than enjoy the ride.” —Booklist
“Filled with humor, heart, and wisdom, as well as vulgarity and authorial trespassing, it’s a story about the contradictions of Grant, which is really to say a story about the contradictions of America. Our culture. Our economy. Our empire.” —Mark Dunbar, Rain Taxi Review of Books
