In this his first collection of essays Saunders trains his eye on the real world rather than the fictional & reveals it to be brimming with wonderful marvellous strangeness As he faces a political & cultural reality saturated with lazy media false promises & political doublespeak Saunders invokes the wisdom of American literary heroes Twain Vonnegut & Barthelme & inspires us to re-examine our assumptions about the world we live in as we struggle to discover what is really there