A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Alexandra Petri's US History is the fake textbook you never knew you needed!
Alexandra Petri's US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding.) Petri's 'historical fan fiction' draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation's complicated past.
On Petri's deranged timeline, John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. Nearly eighty short, hilarious pieces span centuries of American history and culture. Nikola Tesla's friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon. The characters from Sesame Street invade Normandy. And Mark Twain—who famously said reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated—offers a detailed account of his undeath, in which he becomes a zombie.
This side-splitting work of historical humor shows why Alexandra Petri has been hailed as a 'genius,' a 'national treasure,' and 'one of the funniest writers alive.'
These impossibly cheerful essays on the routine horrors of the present era explain everything from the resurgence of measles to the fiasco of the presidency.
In Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, acclaimed satirist Alexandra Petri offers perfectly logical, reassuring reasons for everything that has happened in recent American politics that will in no way unsettle your worldview.
In essays both new and adapted from her viral Washington Post columns, Petri reports that the Trump administration is as competent as it is uncorrupted, white supremacy has never been less rampant, and men have been silenced for too long. The 'woman card' is a powerful card to play! Q-Anon makes perfect sense! This Panglossian venture into our swampy present offers a virtuosic first draft of history-a parody as surreal and deranged as the Trump administration itself.
Written with devastating wit that reveals a persistent, perhaps manic optimism about her benighted country, Petri's essays have become iconic expressions of rage and anger, read and liked and shared by hundreds of thousands of people. Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why shows why she has emerged as the preeminent political satirist of her generation.
