WINNER, PATERSON FICTION PRIZE
FINALIST, FOREWORD BOOK OF THE YEAR
OUTSTANDING COLLECTION, THE STORY PRIZE
LONGLIST, FRANK O'CONNOR INTERNATIONAL STORY PRIZE
BRONZE MEDALIST, INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER
From a "gifted storyteller" who delivers "always enjoyable, often
hysterical stories" (New York Times Book Review) comes a meditation on
the American Dream and its discontents. In his most ambitious collection
yet, Steve Almond offers a comic and forlorn portrait of these United
States: our lust for fame, our racial tensions, the toll of perpetual
war, and the pursuit of romantic happiness.
In the exuberant title story, a hapless would-be actor, desperate to
escape the drudgery of his existence, lands the role of a lifetime. In
"Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched," reprinted in Best American Short
Stories, a psychoanalyst with a secret gambling addiction squares off
over the poker table against a damaged ex-patient. In "First Date Back,"
a young woman becomes the target of a traumatized soldier's misguided
hopes for love. And "A Dream of Sleep," the collection's final story,
presents a grief-stricken refugee who tends the graves of a forgotten
cemetery, only to have his fragile peace shattered by an unwelcome
visitor.
Each of these thirteen stories is an urgent investigation of America's
soul, its particular suffering, its injustices, its possibilities for
redemption. With deft sleight of hand, Almond, "a writer who knows us as
well as we know ourselves" (Houston Chronicle), leavens his
disappointment and outrage with a persistent hope for the men and women
who inhabit his worlds. God Bless America offers us an astonishing
vision of our collective fate, rendered in Almond's signature style of
"precise strokes . . . with metaphors so original and spot-on that they
read like epiphanies" (San Francisco Chronicle).
