This Won't Help

“Guaranteed, nonstop laughs (and only some sobbing).”—Emma Allen, humor and cartoon editor for The New Yorker

Part catharsis, part diagnosis, this uproarious collection from New Yorker and McSweeney’s satirist Eli Grober navigates our modern maelstrom. Nothing in this book will help—but a few good laughs won’t hurt. Probably.

There’s a lot going on, all the time. It may feel overwhelming. Don’t worry. It will all be over soon. Until then, This Won’t Help is here to guide you through the apocalypse—offering 100 modest proposals for how you, too, can bask in the End Times. With sharp, satirical essays, stories, correspondences, and more, humorist Eli Grober stares down a world raging with inaction, while corrupt politicians and the 1 percent maximize the profits of self-destruction. As if any of this will help!

Enjoy ineffective think pieces such as . . .

Eli Grober’s biting, Swiftian prose spares no one—not the megalomaniacal billionaire fleeing Earth for a better life on unlivable Mars, not an extremely online family living completely off-grid, not even a fossil-fuel lobbyist insisting we all stop using straws. (However, Eli does spare a kind thought for the supremely intelligent readers with the good sense to buy this book.) Maybe, just maybe, descending through the inferno of our environmental, economic, and political landscape will help us find real solutions to the absurdity, hypocrisy, and dysfunction that surround us. But probably not!