A hilarious and incisive collection of essays from George Saunders, the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of the 2017 Man Booker Prize winner Lincoln in the Bardo

In this, his first collection of essays, Saunders trains his eye on the real world rather than the fictional and reveals it to be brimming with wonderful, marvellous strangeness. As he faces a political and cultural reality saturated with lazy media, false promises and political doublespeak, Saunders invokes the wisdom of American literary heroes Twain, Vonnegut and Barthelme and inspires us to re-examine our assumptions about the world we live in, as we struggle to discover what is really there.

"‘Deceptively light ... deadpan funny ... Saunders, as an American social and literary critic, may be shaping up as the Orwell of the millennium'" - The Times

"‘Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny'" - Zadie Smith

"‘Saunders is a warm and funny guide through familiar and foreign landscapes ... His job is to observe and be funny ... in a tone often reminiscent of Bill Bryson'" - Observer

"‘Again and again, Saunders demonstrates that wacky, subversive, formally strange writing is not only contrary to our nation's capitalist spirit, it's the most natural and effective of responses to it. He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him'" - Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections