Kurt Andersen

How did we get here?In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what?s happening in our country today?this post-factual, ?fake news? moment we?re all living through?is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.Over the course of five centuries?from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials?our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we?ve never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies?every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY"The Washington Post - San Francisco Chronicle" In "True Believers, " Kurt Andersen--the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of "Heyday" and "Turn of the Century"--delivers his most powerful and moving novel yet. Dazzling in its wit and effervescent insight, this kaleidoscopic tour de force of cultural observation and seductive storytelling alternates between the present and the 1960s--and indelibly captures the enduring impact of that time on the ways we live now. Karen Hollander is a celebrated attorney who recently removed herself from consideration for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her reasons have their roots in 1968--an episode she's managed to keep secret for more than forty years. Now, with the imminent publication of her memoir, she's about to let the world in on that shocking secret--as soon as she can track down the answers to a few crucial last questions. As junior-high-school kids back in the early sixties, Karen and her two best friends, Chuck and Alex, roamed suburban Chicago on their bikes looking for intrigue and excitement. Inspired by the exotic romance of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, they acted out elaborate spy missions pitting themselves against imaginary Cold War villains. As friendship carries them through childhood and on to college--in a polarized late-sixties America riven by war and race as well as sex, drugs, and rock and roll--the bad guys cease to be the creatures of make-believe. Caught up in the fervor of that extraordinary and uncanny time, they find themselves swept into a dangerous new game with the highest possible stakes. Today, only a handful of people are left who know what happened. As Karen reconstructs the past and reconciles the girl she was then with the woman she is now, finally sharing pieces of her secret past with her national-security-cowboy boyfriend and activist granddaughter, the power of memory and history and luck become clear. A resonant coming-of-age story and a thrilling political mystery, "True Believers" is Kurt Andersen's most ambitious novel to date, introducing a brilliant, funny, and irresistible new heroine to contemporary fiction. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader's Circle for author chats and more. Praise for "True Believers" "Funny, fiendishly smart."--"San Francisco Chronicle" "A great American novel."--"Vanity Fair" "A big, swinging novel . . . a] colorful story . . . This could be the most rambunctious meeting your book club will have for a long time.""--The Washington Post"" " "Intelligent and insightful . . . Think "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" and "Atonement, " a '60s-era female Holden Caulfield. . . . Andersen is an agile storyteller. . . . There are] witty, occasionally even profound observations about the '60s and today.""--USA Today"" " "So epic: Part thriller, part coming-of-age tale, the novel alternates between the present and the 1960s, capturing some of America's most pivotal moments in history like a time capsule.""--Marie Claire"" " "This is an ambitious and remarkable novel, wonderfully voiced, about memory, secrets, guilt, and the dangers of certitude. Moreover, it asks essential questions about what it means to be an American and, in a sense, what it means to be America."--"Booklist" (starred review)" " "Fascinating and wisely observant.""--O: The Oprah Magazine"

Heyday is a brilliantly imagined, wildly entertaining tale of America's boisterous coming of age-a sweeping panorama of madcap rebellion and overnight fortunes, palaces and brothels, murder and revenge-as well as the story of a handful of unforgettable characters discovering the nature of freedom, loyalty, friendship, and true love. In the middle of the nineteenth century, modern life is being born: the mind-boggling marvels of photography, the telegraph, and railroads; a flood of show business spectacles and newspapers; rampant sex and drugs and drink (and moral crusades against all three); Wall Street awash with money; and giddy utopian visions everywhere. Then, during a single amazing month at the beginning of 1848, history lurches: America wins its war of manifest destiny against Mexico, gold is discovered in northern California, and revolutions sweep across Europe-sending one eager English gentleman off on an epic transatlantic adventure. . . . Amid the tumult, aristocratic Benjamin Knowles impulsively abandons the Old World to reinvent himself in New York, where he finds himself embraced by three restless young Americans: Timothy Skaggs, muckraking journalist, daguerreotypist, pleasure-seeker, stargazer; the fireman Duff Lucking, a sweet but dangerously damaged veteran of the Mexican War; and Duff's dazzling sister Polly Lucking, a strong-minded, free thinking actress (and discreet part-time prostitute) with whom Ben falls hopelessly in love. Beckoned by the frontier, new beginnings, and the prospects of the California Gold Rush, all four set out on a transcontinental race west-relentlessly tracked, unbeknownst to them, by a cold-blooded killer bent on revenge. A fresh, impeccable portrait of an era startlingly reminiscent of our own times, Heyday is by turns tragic and funny and sublime, filled with bona fide heroes and lost souls, visionaries (Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin, Alexis de Tocqueville) and monsters, expanding horizons and narrow escapes. It is also an affecting story of four people passionately chasing their American dreams at a time when America herself was still being dreamed up-an enthralling, old-fashioned yarn interwoven with a bracingly modern novel of ideas. "In this utterly engaging novel, the author of Turn of the Century brings 19th-century America vividly to life . . . While this is a long book, it moves quickly, with historical detail that's involving but never a drag on the action; the characters are beautifully drawn. A terrific book; highly recommended." -Library Journal"Heyday is fuled by manic energy, fanatical research, and a wicked sense of humor.... It's a joyful, wild gallop through a joyful, wild time to be an American." -Vanity Fair

A penetrating and moving novel about a crumbling marriage, set against the backdrop of a near-future America in the process of its own disintegration, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses Natalie and Asher's marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they see the world and the lives they imagined within it. Now with both children nearly grown, their own ambitions at cross purposes, and a world transformed by AI, it feels like they have less in common than ever. After twenty-three years together, they're living apart. As they navigate the terms of their separation, America is doing the same thing. It's 2045, and the country is in the throes of a complex, years-long process of redrawing borders after an awful 2030s uprising that ended with red states seceding to form their own government, and blue cities breaking off from those states. While Natalie retreats to her childhood home in Tennessee--most of the state now part of the new Free American Republic--Asher stays behind in San Francisco, running the controversial National Institute of the Mind for a quixotic trillionaire and parenting their younger child, Logan. Apart for the first time in decades, Natalie and Asher's relationship becomes a mirror of America's own long unraveling--confused, messy, painful, and impossibly intimate. When Natalie and Asher are forced back into proximity while touring colleges with Logan, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain postwar American landscape, while confronting the flux within their own family. And they are faced with the question the nation already reckoned with: Is something broken still worth saving? Razor-sharp, ambitious, at turns tragic and funny, brimming with imagination and surprises, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly prescient and keenly insightful. And in the end, surprisingly hopeful.

Largely out of sight, they rapidly built and funded a new empire of think tanks and academic institutions and professional organisations, lobbying and political groups, using them to transform politics, media, finance, the legal system and US laws to reinvent and control the political economy.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change--and charts a way back to the future. "Essential, absorbing . . . a graceful, authoritative guide . . . a radicalized moderate's moderate case for radical change."--The New York Times Book Review During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope. Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America's undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame--to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal "useful idiots," among whom he includes himself. Only a writer with Andersen's crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen's vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change--and charts a way back to the future. "Essential, absorbing . . . a graceful, authoritative guide . . . a radicalized moderate's moderate case for radical change."--The New York Times Book Review During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope. Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America's undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame--to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal "useful idiots," among whom he includes himself. Only a writer with Andersen's crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen's vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.

All The Presidents is created by the caricaturist of the Barack Obama/George Washington mash-up inauguration cover for The New Yorker in 2009. It features everyone from George Washington to Donald Trump, accompanied by presidential factoids. It includes a foreword by Kurt Andersen, the author and host of public radio's Studio 360,

You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own factsIf you want to understand Trump's America, how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you have to go back to the very beginning and take a dizzying road trip across five centuries of crackpot delusion and make-believe from Salem to Scientology.From the Pilgrim Fathers onward America has been a place where renegades and freaks came in search of freedom to create their own realities with little objectively regulated truth standing in their way. To invent and believe what the hell you like is in some ways an unwritten constitutional right. Every citizen is more than ever gloriously free to construct and promote any vision of the world he or she devoutly believes to be true. That do-your-own-thing freedom - run amok since the individualism and relativism of the 1960s and later the unprecedented free-for-all world of the Internet, is the driving credo of America's current transformation where the difference between opinion and fact is rapidly crumbling.Fantasyland is a journey that joins the dots between the disparate crazed franchises of true believers ? America?s endless homespun rebooting of Christianity from Mormons to charismatics, medicine shows to new age quacks, conspiracy theorists of every stripe, showmen hucksters from P T Barnum to Trump himself, Creationists to climate change deniers, extra-terrestrial obsessives to gun-toting libertarians, anti-Government paranoia, pseudoscience, survivalists and satanic panic. Along the way Kurt Andersen has created a unique and raucous history of America and a new paradigm for understanding our post-factual world.

Donald Trump was elected because he was the most frank presidential candidate in history, a man always eager to tell the unvarnished truth about others' flaws as well as his own excellence. Written by two world-renowned Trump scholars, this title includes many historic photographs of him in private and public, making America great again.

How did Richard Ford's cat influence his work as a novelist? How is Chuck Close's portraiture driven by his inability to remember faces? What pivotal moment helped Rosanne Cash understand the healing power of the stage? Creativity is an elusive subject. We enjoy its fruits-movies, novels, paintings, songs-but rarely are we privy to what happens in the creative process. In "Spark", Julie Burstein traces the roots of some of the twenty-first century's most influential and creative thinkers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Yo-Yo Ma, David Milch, Isabel Allende, and Joshua Redman. Burstein pulls back the curtain to reveal the sources of these artists' inspiration and the processes that bring their work into being. These artists may not change lead into gold, Burstein writes, but they lift materials from their familiar contexts, combining, reshaping, transforming them into works of art that change the way we see the world. "Spark" is an invaluable resource for the aspiring writer and artist, but the need for creativity extends well beyond the world of paintbrushes and typewriters. Creativity is integral to business, parenting, education, science, and, perhaps most poignantly, our personal relationships. Rarely do books on creativity illuminate and inspire; this marvelous volume will help you find a spark of your own.

Following the publication in September 2008 of the first three books featuring The Library of Congress' internationally renowned collection of Farm Security Administration and Office of War information photographs, the series will continue with images chosen from the works of John Vachon, Esther Bubley and Jack Delano. Providing a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and Second World War, each "Fields of Vision" volume includes an introduction to the life of the photographer and over 50 evocative images selected from their work. Transporting the viewer to American homes, farms and streets in the 1930s and 1940s, they also offer a glimpse of a new narrative and intimate style that was later to blossom on the pages of "LOOK" and "LIFE" magazines. For many Americans of the pre-television age, the diversity and complexity of their country was defined by the lenses of these men and women.

You may already know that Belgium is the most boring country on planet Earth, but do you know why? Or what makes the Mark 44, Model O Lazy Dog Missile Cluster, the sexiest piece of military hardware on wheels? Or how LSD edged out all contenders as the Platonic Ideal of illicit drugs?From cities to sitcoms, from scotch to soda, from English monarchs to French movies, The Real Thing is a compendium of the quintessential, providing definitive answers to some of the most compelling questions of our time: What confection out-cholesterols the competition? Why is The Country Club the country club? Which Charlie Chan proved the least scrutable? Author Kurt Andersen's pithy pronouncements sparkle with wit, sophistication, and a healthy dose of skeptical good humor as he strips world culture of accumulated hype and accepted wisdom, laying bare the sine qua nons and the ne plus ultras in a sassy series of satirical essays that give credit where credit is due while simultaneously foreclosing on the bogus, the ersatz, the would-be, and the has-been. The Real Thing is the real thing. These days, that's really something.

We are living in what one author describes as ""highly promotional times."" Governments and corporations, nonprofits and special interest groups, all have spin doctors trying to turn the news to their advantage. This increasingly incestuous connection between the practitioners of public relations and journalism has resulted in a troubling shift in power. ""Public Relations and the Press"" examines how this shift came to be and explores the questions it raises about the role of media in a democratic society and the future of journalism. A democracy works when individuals have access to reliable information upon which to base decisions - information that in our day comes from the mass media. But what if journalists do not have the wherewithal to question their sources and evaluate the information they provide? This, Karla K. Gower explains, is precisely what happens when economic and competitive pressures shift power from the journalist to the source - and the source, not the journalist, controls the flow of information to the public. Gowers describes a situation in which people, ""informed"" by practitioners of public relations, do not have sufficient information to make valid decisions. At stake is the core credibility of the press itself, and therefore the essential claim of journalism to a privileged role in a democratic social order.

"A big, sprawling book . . . Kurt Andersen has] infused it with so much inventive imagination. . . . Should be put in a Manhattan time capsule with the note: 'This is how we lived at the turn of the century.' "--The New York Times Book Review NATIONAL BESTSELLER In his brash, brilliant first novel, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen casts a penetrating eye on our giddy, media-obsessed era. With a keen sense of irony and a storyteller's grace, he weaves a tale that is at once a biting satire and a wickedly incisive portrait of marriage, family, love, and friendship. The millennium is here. BarbieWorld has opened in Las Vegas. Charles Manson's parole hearing is on live TV. And George and Lizzie are a Manhattan power couple with three kids in private school and take-out from Hiroshima Boy waiting at the door. Lizzie owns a software start-up. George is a TV producer. With cell phones tickling their thighs and gossip buzzing in their ears, their future couldn't be brighter. Until, that is, Lizzie cuts a deal with George's boss and gets an office twenty-one floors above her husband's. Until all the glitter and the hype threaten to destroy George's and Lizzie's sanity and their marriage. Until the only thing that can save them is a little understanding--at a time when everyone is talking but no one hears a thing. "Savagely subversive . . . a smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age."--The Wall Street Journal "Inspired . . . astonishing . . . very funny."--Entertainment Weekly "A big, Tom Wolfe-ish New York comic novel . . . on the last breath of the century."--Elle