A review by bjr2022
God Bless America: Stories by Steve Almond

5.0

This is writing that crackles and pops with energy and pulsating life. It makes you laugh and cry or yell Woah in shock. Steve Almond writes from his gut, and it’s a carnival down there: a poker-playing shrink and his card-shark client (I love the cover of this book; it conveys the originality of the writing); a loser actor; white teenage slummers and a black fixer-upper craftsman; a scheming little kid and a tough TSA agent; a harried, maybe pregnant, unmarried ad agency exec; a crazy wretch of a woman and a frantic young busboy; a dying father, his struggling grown son, and a hallucinated bird; a creepy mother and son and the even creepier stranger who unmasks them; a hilarious Edgar-Allen-Poe-on-acid family of French aristocrats and the Jewish boyfriend who visits them (“A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve”—one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read); a mother who makes a heartbreakingly misguided choice for her wounded-warrior son; a beleaguered currency researcher; a shell-shocked soldier; and a graveyard caretaker who is forced to fight for life.

These are all real people fighting for an America (meaning “life”) that cannot and will not be. My kind of characters, my kind of writer, my kind of stories.