Building on a project launched by David Eggers, the very strange Sarah Vowell brings together a collection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and category-defining gems. Among the 28 pieces are contributions by Ta-Nehisi Coates ("My President Was Black"), Louise Erdrich ("How to Stop a Black Snake"), Lin-Manuel Miranda ("You'll Be Back"), and George Saunders ("Who Are All These Trump Supporters?").
Is there a common theme to these essays? Not really. Is there a common message? Still less so. The same can be said of those popular New Yorker collections "from the 1940s", "from the 1950s", and so on. What then can participants expect? The deeply pluralist sensiblilities of a mostly younger generation of writers—a generation for whom "consensus" and "over-arching agreement" are alien constructs. The New Yorker too conveyed a common sensibility—the New Yorker "style"—but during more innocent, less divisive times.