August 2026

The Breakup

Natalie and Asher’s 23-year marriage has long-standing fault lines over what they think of their fellow Americans and of AI-saturated modern life. In 2045, having survived the two-year civil war together, they’re living separately for the first time since they met. Millennial Asher is in San Francisco with their daughter; Gen-Z Natalie has retreated to her home state of Tennessee in the Free American Republic. The couple’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.

Brought back together for a sprawling college tour with their 17-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new carved-up America, all while dealing with the flux—and resilience—in their own family. With the hovering question: What differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving? Ranging from tragic to comic to suspenseful, and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping tale of the personal and sociopolitical intersecting—bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

Evil Geniuses

The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller

During most of the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then in the 1980s the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. By means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, corrupting politics, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope.

In this deeply researched cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt offers a fresh, provocative, eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots.”

Fantasyland

How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

New York Times bestseller. Winner of the Forkosch Award for the best humanist book of the year.

In this 500-year history of America, Andersen illuminates how what’s happening in our country now—this strange, post-truth, “fake news” era—is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of a big part of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers and eventually a fantasy-industrial complex. Believe-whatever-you-want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Thus the politics and culture of twenty-first-century America, with more and more lines between reality and fiction dangerously blurred.

You Can’t Spell America Without Me

The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody)

New York Times bestseller

Until Donald Trump publishes his account of his entire four or eight or one-and-a-half years in the White House, the definitive chronicle will be the New York Times bestseller You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President, by Kurt Andersen and Alec Baldwin. As Donald Trump’s presidency came to a close, Baldwin and Andersen collaborated on Hasta la Vista, America: Trump’s Farewell Address, an audiobook imagining a final speech by the president, complete with music and sound effects.

True Believers

Best novels of the year: San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post

Karen Hollander is a celebrated attorney and former top Justice Department official who recently removed herself from consideration for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her reasons have their roots in 1968—an episode she’s managed to keep secret for almost half a century. Now, with the imminent publication of her memoir she’s about to let the world in on that shocking secret—as soon as she can track down the answers to a few crucial last questions. Today, only a handful of people know the truth. As Karen reconstructs the past and reconciles the girl she was then with the woman she is now, sharing pieces of her secret past with her national-security-cowboy boyfriend and activist granddaughter, the power of memory and history and luck become clear. A coming-of-age story and political mystery told by a funny, thoughtful woman of a certain age.

Reset

How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America

AdAge’s 10 Best Books of 2010

Heyday

Winner of the Langum Prize for the Best American Historical Fiction of the year. Bestseller lists of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly and The Boston Globe. Best Novels of 2007: Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Public Library and The Onion’s A.V. Club.

Heyday is a tale of America’s boisterous coming of age—a panorama of rebellion and overnight fortunes, palaces and brothels, murder and revenge—as well as the story of a handful of characters discovering the nature of freedom, loyalty, friendship, and true love. In the middle of the nineteenth century, modern life is being born: the mind-boggling marvels of photography, the telegraph, and railroads; a flood of show business spectacles and newspapers; rampant sex and drugs and drink (and moral crusades against all three); Wall Street awash with money; and giddy utopian visions cropping up everywhere.

Then during a single amazing month at the beginning of 1848, history lurches: America wins its war of manifest destiny against Mexico, gold is discovered in northern California, and revolutions sweep across Europe—sending one eager English gentleman off on an epic transatlantic and then transcontinental adventure. Aristocratic Benjamin Knowles abandons the Old World to reinvent himself in New York City, where he finds himself embraced by three restless young Americans: Timothy Skaggs, muckraking journalist, daguerreotypist, pleasure-seeker; fireman Duff Lucking, a sweet but dangerously damaged veteran of the Mexican War; and Duff’s dazzling sister Polly, a free-thinking actress and prostitute with whom Ben falls in love. Beckoned by frontier California Gold Rush, all four set out on a race west—relentlessly tracked by a killer.

Spy: The Funny Years

“It’s a piece of garbage.” — Donald Trump

Spy: The Funny Years was published on the 20th anniversary of Spy’s creation and created with Graydon Carter and George Kalogerakis, Andersen’s fellow members of the magazine’s founding team. It’s an oversized illustrated anthology and inside story. As the promotional copy had it: “All the best is here: Separated at Birth; Naked City; The Fine Print; Logrolling in Our Time; the Blurb-o-Mat; those funny (and now ubiquitous) charts; the inside stories on the New York Times and Hollywood; the covers; investigative features; and the stories on pretty much everyone who was anyone during the late late 80s and early 90s. Not to mention Spy’s regular cast of characters—the churlish dwarf billionaires, socialite war criminals, beaver-faced moguls, bull-whip-wielding uber-agents and, of course, short-fingered vulgarians.”

Turn of the Century

National bestseller. New York Times Notable Book of the year. Publishers Weekly called it one of the ten best long novels ever in 2016.

Andersen’s prescient first novel plunges deep inside the giddy beginnings of our digitally revolutionized, money-mad, media-drenched, fantasy-and-reality-blurring era. The new millennium is here. BarbieWorld has opened in Las Vegas. Charles Manson’s parole hearing is on live TV. And George and Lizzie are a Manhattan power couple with three kids in private school and take-out from Hiroshima Boy waiting at the door. Lizzie owns a video game start-up. George is a TV producer who made a new hit show that mixes real cops and actors playing cops. With personal computers and webcams as the new things and cell phones tickling their thighs and gossip buzzing in their ears, their future couldn’t be brighter. Until Lizzie cuts a deal with George’s boss and gets an office twenty-one floors above her husband’s. And an internet hoax concerning Microsoft then turns the stock market and their lives upside down.

The Real Thing

A Book That Separates the Men from the Boys, and the Wheat from the Chaff, and the Bogus from the Bona Fide

Andersen’s first book, written in his early twenties, a collection of eighty very short essays about the quintessential example of eighty categories of things, including: affectations, basketball players, breakfast cereals, fears, French movies, folk singers, fun that isn’t, homosexuals, illicit drugs, insects, law firms, mass murderers, myths about childhood, planets, sexual positions, sitcoms, and unpleasant surprises. The book’s entry on gay people, about the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie introduced that idea into the culture, which has, over the years, generated media attention again and again and again.

Studio 360

Host and co-creator, 2000–2020

Studio 360 was a Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast consisting of interviews with artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, designers, and scholars, and reported pieces about arts and culture and the creative process. It first aired in New York and Los Angeles and a few other cities in the fall of 2000; in 2020, at the time of its final episode, it was broadcast on more than 217 stations nationwide, and nearly a million people listened to each weekly episode over the air and by podcast. In addition to its two Peabodys and many other awards, Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic and former art critic for The New York Times, called it “the best program on radio.”

Command Z

Co-created with Steven Soderbergh

A sci-fi comedy series—8 episodes, just 95 minutes in all—inspired by Evil Geniuses. Co-created with Steven Soderbergh, stars Michael Cera, Liev Schreiber, Roy Woods Jr., Kevin Pollak and Chloe Radcliffe.

Spy

Co-founder

Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter created Spy in 1986, along with publisher Tom Phillips. The magazine covered culture, politics, the media and the rich and powerful of all stripes in New York and Hollywood and Washington in a way no other publication was doing in that pre-internet time, carefully reported and researched journalism with a satirical edge. The magazine started breaking even financially after three years. Spy created prime-time specials for NBC in 1991 and 1992. Although the magazine continued publishing until 1998, the founding team moved on by 1993, after the magazine was sold.