These practices are pragmatic money and power usually lie at the heart of such scheming, and Trump's rampant, transparent deceit is only the apotheosis of American's long history of the grift. She astutely lays out her argument: that the twisting of stories and negation of facts by the right is only nominally ideological, if at all. It's split into six sections, each of which tackles a single, urgent topic, from feminism to free speech to Black Lives Matter. While he and his populist, ad hoc movement are very much the oxygen that enflame Malik's activist outrage and academic curiosity, her book ranges more widely. We Need New Stories, to its benefit, doesn't begin and end with Trump. Today, though, the recognition of how we tell stories - and to whom - is central to understanding the battle that progressives are truly waging. Like any other weapon, narrative can and has been used for both good and evil throughout eons of human civilization. There's nothing crafty or complicated about any of Trump's individual mistruths, the book points out it's only when they're woven together that they become systemically insidious.Īs Malik expertly explains, story is the sin. Written in the aftermath of Donald Trump's Electoral College win in 2016, the book is framed by the former president's myriad blunt dishonesties. Her childhood disillusionment forms the compelling and much-needed emotional core of We Need New Stories. When she learned how false and fanciful this narrative was - members of her family in Khartoum were so poor that many slept in the yard outside their overcrowded house - she felt betrayed. She's speaking of a bit of family folklore that has been passed down from generation to generation: The notion that in their homeland of Sudan, a forebear owned a house that was so large, tea would grow cold while one walked from one side of it to the other. It is sort of a private family madness,' Nesrine Malik writes in the introduction to her debut book, We Need New Stories. 'Throughout my childhood I was fed this ancestral myth that still remains fixed for many of my generation of Maliks. We Need New Stories: The Myths that Subvert Freedom by Nesrine Malik / W.W.

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