Bad Stories, Steve Almond
Bad Stories, Steve Almond
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Bad Stories
What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

Author: Steve Almond

Narrator: Steve Almond

Unabridged: 6 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/03/2018

Synopsis

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.

About Steve Almond

Steve Almond is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Betsy on May 07, 2025

5/7/25 Update I've updated, editorialized on, and republished this review on my Substack column. Original 2/23/18 review This book is staggeringly good. I was familiar with Steve Almond from his short stories, but this is straight journalism at its best (which he teaches at Harvard). (It is clear from......more

Goodreads review by Trish on June 12, 2018

Because I’ve been keeping up with the news over the past couple of years, I was as aware as anyone “what the hell just happened to our country.” But this book was particularly recommended by a GR friend and I was curious what Almond knew that I didn’t. I couldn’t bear to start at the beginning of th......more

Goodreads review by Megan on February 09, 2018

Drawing on history, literature, and criticism, Steve Almond of Dear Sugars parses the bad stories that led to the ultimate bad outcome in November of 2016. This book gave me a much greater understanding of the cultural forces that led to the election of Donald Trump, and I feel more informed and emp......more

Goodreads review by David on July 15, 2018

I should like this. This should fill my mind with blissful confirmation bias. And he has dozens of cool insights and historical trivia to back up many of those insights. Even though there is some structure, chapter headings to come, by the time I was finished I had trouble remembering much of anythi......more

Goodreads review by Cynthia on March 28, 2018

If you have asked your self this question, you'd better grab this book now. It's not just a Monday morning quarterback commentary, it's an incredibly accurate, concise, and lucid explanation of just what has been going on, how, and why it happened. It's a fast read and in a sense humbling, as we can......more

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