Tales of Two Americas ─ Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

Thirty-four major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided America

America is broken. You don't need a fistful of statistics to know this. Visit any city and evidence of our shattered social compact will present itself. And inequality is not just an urban problem. From Appalachia to the Rust Belt and down to rural Texas, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest stretches to unimaginable gulfs. Whether the cause of this inequality is systemic injustice, the entrenchment of racism in our culture, the long war on drugs, or immigration policies, it not only endangers the American Dream but our very lives.

In Tales of Two Americas, thirty four of the literary world's most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to account for what it feels like to live in this divided nation. In Idaho, Anthony Doerr returns home and discovers a stranger asleep in his driveway; in Los Angeles, Hector Tobar reports on the gang shooting of a young boy his own son's age; in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit devastatingly recounts how gentrification led to the death of a young man; and in New York, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of an older white woman's visit to a Black Lives Matter protest at a Baptist church.

In these extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems, the brilliant minds of Edwidge Danticat, Roxane Gay, Eula Biss and others traverse the fault lines that separate rich and poor, black and white, native and undocumented to recast the story of America in their words. This fiction and reportage also suggests that the solution to our problems may exist in the space between us. From Karen Russell's imagining that the cure for the homeless epidemic might be an epidemic of generosity, to Ann Patchett's memory of an exemplary priest who lived by the imperative to "Love your neighbor," Tales of Two Americas demonstrates how boundaries can break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches us all.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Lit Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Cities, an anthology of new writing about inequality in New York City today. His latest book is Maps, a collection of poems. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at The New School and New York University.