Good Americans

Book excerpt: In the tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner, this groundbreaking short story collection paints an uncompromising portrait of a contemporary America filled with liars and buffoons, racists and swindlers, hypocritical ideologues and emotional manipulators. An Italian-American racist receives his comeuppance from a ghetto Hispanic teenager; a blonde runaway from Florida is forced into prostitution on her road from the South to North; a Dominican-American professor is embroiled in academic intrigue; a scarred white war veteran stalks a black stripper; an ambitious Midwestern journalist pursues a mysterious Indian-American lawyer. Good Americans is a "grand assault" against the fiction of our time, delivering a mind-blowing diversity of voices, subjects and effects. By turns thought-provoking, disturbing, hilarious and deeply moving, Good Americans is the first selection in The Human Tragedy, a panorama of our society that The New Wei will bring out over the coming years.