The Lonely Young and the Lonely Old is a collection of quiet and brutal jewels. Told in the words of an unnamed narrator, each story gives voice to the easily dismissed: the lonely high school student, the elderly widower, the pining woman in her twenties, and the worn-down mother in her mid-thirties. Each speaks from the center of an almost paralyzed intensity, desperately searching for articulation and belonging. And there are others: neglected children who escape into the woods from their alcoholic mother and turn into deer; the couple who choose to leave their urban environment by transforming into swans on their early-morning commute; and the young man who encounters his double, the familiar doppelganger now carrying modern anxieties. The concluding novella, "Bearing the Names of Many, " takes the form of diary entries written somewhere in America a few months or a few years from now, as the narrator watches the world go under and descend into war and spreading disease. Assuming no one will last to write the global history of this end, he sets to documenting what will really be lost: the simplicity of everyday lives, and the generosity of everyday love.

The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERFormer Republican political operative Tim Miller answers the question no one else has fully grappled with: Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism? As one of the strategists behind the famous 2012 RNC "autopsy, " Miller conducts his own forensic study on the pungent carcass of the party he used to love, cutting into all the hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception for everyone to see. In a bracingly honest reflection on both his own past work for the Republican Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment, Miller draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican political class's Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th. From ruminations on the mental jujitsu that allowed him as a gay man to justify becoming a hitman for homophobes, to astonishingly raw interviews with former colleagues who jumped on the Trump Train, Miller diagrams the flattering and delusional stories GOP operatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night. With a humorous touch he reveals Reince Priebus' neediness, Sean Spicer's desperation, Elise Stefanik and Chris Christie's raw ambition, and his close friends' submission to a MAGA psychosis. Why We Did It is a vital, darkly satirical warning that all the narcissistic justifications that got us to this place still thrive within the Republican party, which means they will continue to make the same mistakes and political calculations that got us here, with disastrous consequences for the nation.

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