Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks following the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn’t simply the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in virtually any sort of coherent way, why America got elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Poor Stories: The actual Hell Just Happened to Our Nation is Almond’s work to make feeling of our historical moment, to connect particular dots that move unconnected amid the deluge of warm about Bad Stories: The actual Hell Just Happened to Our Country takes and think pieces. Almond appears to literary voices―from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin―to help describe the roots of our moral erosion as a people.

The book argues that Trumpism is a negative outcome arising directly from the poor stories we tell ourselves. To understand how exactly we got here, we must confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press right into a for-profit market, our long lasting pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Poor Stories can be a lamentation aimed at offering clarity. It’s the book you can transfer for an anguished fellow traveller with the guarantee, This will help you know very well what the hell occurred to our nation.