Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why: Essays (Paperback)
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Staff Reviews
Alexandra Petri glares into maw of the American abyss, and the abyss stares back, but then Petri smirks, and the abyss kinda chuckles, and everybody says, aw, jeez, and gets to have a laugh at our horrible, horrible mess. If good comics punch up, then Petri is firing a bazooka at the sky, blowing up the bad faith charlatans in charge with a direct and deviously brilliant trick: asking you realize just how baldly, absurdly evil the president and his sycophants are if you take them and their lies at face value. Petri doesn’t flinch in the only book about politics this year worth the time it takes to read. Standing ovation.
— Chris LeeDescription
A finalist for the Thurber Prize
With new essays on the crises of 2020
“Amazing.” —Amy Schumer
In Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, acclaimed Washington Post 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 columns, Petri reports that the Trump administration was as competent as it was 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 that chronicles the chaotic half-decade from the twilight of the Obama years to the final gasp of the Trump administration.
“One of the difficulties of being alive today,” Petri notes, “is that everything is absurd but fewer and fewer things are funny.” 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.
About the Author
Alexandra Petri is a humorist and columnist for the Washington Post and author of three books including Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, a Thurber Prize finalist. She lives in Washington, DC.
Praise For…
Alexandra Petri is a genius who makes the pain more bearable. I’m indebted to her always… for the mirth and for the rage.
— Rebecca Traister
[Alexandra Petri] masterfully cloaks the absurdism of modern reality in farce… and makes us laugh at it.
— Tiffany D. Cross - New York Times Book Review
Only Petri has the wit, the imagination, and the humor to fully understand the madness of the Trump era. If this is hell, she is our Virgil, except funny.
— Peter Sagal
[Alexandra Petri is] the miracle satirist for an unsatirizable era.
— Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer Prize–winning culture critic
[Alexandra Petri is a] fresh and prolific voice, someone who [is] able to make the painful reality of our current sociopolitical dumpster fire not just very, very funny, but stingingly poignant.
— Julie Klam - Washington Post
One of the funniest writers alive.
— Randall Munroe
The funniest person in Washington.
— Dave Barry
Incomparable.
— Annette Gordon-Reed
Hilarious.
— Megan Amram
The true stable genius of our day and age.
— Katha Pollitt