Good Trouble Stories

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.

Joseph O’Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.