Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

Sully is staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he only has a year or two left, and he's busy as hell keeping the news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years. The ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends. Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure. Doug Raymer, now Chief of Police and still obsessing over the identity...

The Jungle, a novel by American journalist Upton Sinclair (1878—1968), was written in 1906 to portray the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants living in Chicago and similar industrialized cities in the United States. While his main goal in describing the working conditions in the meat industry was based on an investigation he conducted for a socialist newspaper with the goal of advancing socialism in the United States, most readers...

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...

Ingemar is a working-class 12-year old boy who is sent to live with his uncle after his mother falls ill. There, he takes refuge from his troubles with the help of the town's warmhearted eccentrics. A bittersweet evocation of the struggles and joys of childhood and the pains of coming-of-age.

An amusing portrait of a working-class family in a suburb just north of London, an irrepressible mum and dad and their night-and-day twins, a bookish good girl and a sneering layabout. A vivid, lived-in story of ordinary existence, in which even modest dreams (such as the father's desire to open a food truck) carry enormous weight. Perched on the line between humor and melancholy.

"Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school -- and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it"--

Three Lives (1909) is a collection of novellas by Gertrude Stein. Characterized by its straightforward narrative style and disjointed prose, Three Lives proved a breakthrough for Stein, who had previously found it difficult bringing her works to publication. Each novella is set in Bridgepoint, a fictionalized version of Baltimore, where working class people of all races undergo the dignities and indignities of life in an industrialized nation. In...

Sharing a family life in the 1930s near the legendary Palisades Amusement Park, a family of dreamers explores ambitions and cultural boundaries that are challenged by the realities of the Great Depression, multiple wars, and the park's eventual closing in 1971.