An outspoken conservative commentator considers the state of the West today, asking why, if American lives have never been better than at any other time in history, the United States' political, social, and economic situation is beginning to erode.

"Here are eighteen stories of astonishing range and precision. A housewife drinks alone in her Connecticut living room. A guillotine glimmers above a sleepy town green. A pre-recorded customer service message sends a caller into a reverie of unspeakable yearning. With the deft touch and funhouse-mirror perspectives for which he has won countless admirers, Steven Millhauser gives us the towns, marriages, and families of a quintessential American lifestyle...

"Some of America's best reporters and thinkers offer an urgent look at a country in chaos in this collection of timely, often prophetic articles from The Atlantic"--

A British journalist and documentary filmmaker describes her baffled encounters with America's culture of pursuing happiness at all costs, recounting her investigations into happiness-themed programs that have become part of a multibillion-dollar commercial industry.

In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times--class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently. Now,...

Combining history and sociology, a public policy professor discusses the shift in American life that has disconnected neighbors from one another, limiting exposure to different types of people, ideas, and lifestyles.

"After a decade abroad, the National Book Award -- and Pulitzer Prize -- winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States-Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL -- to illuminate the origins of America's political fury"--

"Quichotte, an aging traveling salesman obsessed with the "unreal real" of TV, falls in impossible love with a queen of the screen; while obsessively writing her love letters, he wishes an imaginary son, Sancho, into existence. Together they set off across America in Quichotte's trusty Chevy Cruze to find her and convince her of his love. Meanwhile, Quichotte's tragicomic story is being told by the author who created him: Brother, a mediocre spy novelist...

Don't just see the sights, get to know the people. Who can afford not to understand the USA? Underneath the gleaming smile of American popular culture lies a rich and complex society that brims with contrasts and contradictions. It is a culture of rugged individualism, of go-getters, of high-tech high achievers. At the same time it is a deeply religious country with a quiet devotion to church and charitable works.