Good Trouble: Stories [Paperback]

From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of Netherland comes a collection of stunning, subversive, wryly comic stories that reveal the emotional depths and surprising beauty of life in the twenty-first century. A poet confronts the state of his art when asked to sign a petition-in-verse to free Edward Snowden. A man attending a wedding in Tuscany seeks a moment of solace with a friendly goose. A father uses a tracking app to follow his son’s stolen phone, opening wider questions of the world and its dangers. In these flashes of trouble, O’Neill unearths the real, secretly political consequences of our ordinary lives. No writer is more incisive about the world we live in now.“Funny and fierce. . . . An essential book, full of unexpected bursts of meaning and beauty.” —Ploughshares

“Wonderful. . . . Comforting. . . . What remains uniformly dazzling throughout is O’Neill’s remarkable dialogue.” —AM New York 

“Elegant, often challenging, and always entertaining.” —The Washington Times

“O’Neill writes with an urgent timeliness. . . . The thrill of seeing the here and now transmuted into morally serious and comically rich prose is heightened once you realize its rarity.” —Guernica

“Beautifully crafted. . . . Wonderful. . . . Gloriously Kafkaesque. . . . O’Neill’s tales often echo [David Foster] Wallace’s mixture of humor and profundity, demonstrating a similar, almost preternatural eye for the absurdities of contemporary life.” —Booklist 

“[A] fine collection . . . Compelling.” —&lS†