"The year is 1911. The young rock blaster Oskar Johansson has been killed in an accident. Or so it says in the local newspaper. In spite of serious injuries, however, Oskar survives. Decades later, Oskar looks back and reflects on his working life as an invalid, his marriage, his dreams, and his hopes. Oskar's life is woven together out of fragments of voices, images, and episodes that, taken together, provide a sharp and precise picture of life in...

Named by the Guardian as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, tell your daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter...

George Orwell's documentary report on conditions among the unemployed in the north of England and what he considers to be wrong with Socialism and Socialists

A powerful first novel about a family that slips from fortune's favor and a town broken by the forces of modernity. Across a bend of Ontario's Attawan River lies the Island, a working-class neighborhood of whitewashed houses and vine-freighted fences, black willows and decaying sheds. Here, for generations, the Walkers have lived among the other mill workers. The family's troubles begin in the summer of 1965, when a union organizer comes to town...

Dynamic artistry celebrating the diverse lives and labors of hardscrabble Southerners. --publisher.

A graphic novel adaptation of Studs Terkel's interviews and accounts of the lives of ordinary Americans.

"The story of an entire generation growing up too quickly…impossible to put down until the dramatic and realistic conclusion." - Library Journal, starred review "A brilliant portrait of a small­ town teenage girl, whose secret affair…feels utterly true…a fresh and indelible book." - Joan Silber It's 1960 in the Panhandle town of Charnelle, Texas-a year and a half since sixteen-year-old Laura Tate's mother boarded a bus and mysteriously disappeared....

"Layoffs upend people's lives, cause enormous stress, and lead to debilitating personal debt. The societal harm caused by mass layoffs has been known for decades. Yet, we do little to stop them. Why? Why do we allow whole communities to be destroyed by corporate decision-makers? Why do we consider mass layoffs a natural, baked-in feature of modern financialized capitalism? In Wall Street's War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute,...

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as "waste people," "offals," "rubbish," "lazy lubbers," and "crackers." By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called "clay eaters" and "sandhillers," known for prematurely-aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature...

"The working-class painter Terry Godden was on the brink of his first success. After a violent crisis, he finds himself outcast. Nearing sixty and with modest means, he has retreated to a small island. The island seems to be a closed, cold place. As the seasons turn, Terry comes to see that he is one of many people who have sought refuge here. These independent outsiders, all with their own considerable struggles, have made a precarious home. The...