Working Class

This book examines the idea of the phenomenon of how the American working class supports the economic elite. This is in direct contradiction to the notion prevalent in the Western world about the rise of populism, the inaccurate assessment of the American working class being against the economic elite.

The Blood on My Lips from Biting My Tongue shines a light on the strenuous working conditions at the largest growing provider of goods in America today and its impact on the working class. Too many Americans are affected by income inequality and harsh working conditions. For far too long, these corporations have held on to their profits with little to no regard for the livelihoods of their employees. Their pockets grow while the average American’s pockets shrink. These conditions have pushed employees to their breaking point.

In Dreams of the Overworked, Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian offer vivid sketches of daily life for nine families, capturing what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of impossible expectations, now amplified unlike ever before by smart devices. We are invited into homes and offices, where we recognize the crushing pressure of unraveling plans, and the healing warmth of being together. Moreover, we witness the constant planning that goes into a "good" day, often with the aid of phones and apps.

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

Carlos Bulosan’s idealism and ambition would seem to position him for certain success in America, even given how young he is when he first makes the journey from the Philippines. However, after arriving in Seattle, employers are far more concerned with his Filipino background than they are with his character. Low-paying jobs - and an uncertain future - remain his daily reality.

Fifteen years ago, 35-year-old Henry Carr vanished from the yard outside his parents' house, on a run-down street outside Manchester. Today, a cold-case podcast has brought the disappearance to international attention. A young journalist, Ruth, knows that she might be able to get the locals to open up. After all, she used to be one of them. But returning won't be easy. There are many reasons why Ruth fled, six years earlier. There’s no evidence, no lead, no body. Yet Henry’s elderly and dementia suffering mother, whispers that he was killed and buried on the street they call home.

In working-class Bay Ridge, Michael drives for a car service and gives lifts to his father, a former sanitation worker and current small-time bookie. He has a friend with a heroin habit, and a longtime girlfriend who expects they’ll get married one of these days. Michael spends most of his time on the familiar streets where he grew up, but now he’s crossing the bridge into Manhattan for some college classes—where he meets a seductive female classmate who seems to come from a whole different world.

Christopher ‘Pip’ Fallow was born in the coal-miner’s cottage where his family of eight lived, in a village near Durham. Pip was destined to join his father and brothers down the pit, but the closure of his village’s mine in the 1980s saw him at the back of the dole queue like the rest. This is Pip’s story of being ‘dragged up proppa’, living by his wits, working and travelling the world before finally settling a few miles from where he grew up.

In CinderGirl, Christina tells her piercing and poignant story of leaving behind homelessness to become Ms. California and the founder of a nonprofit organization that provides advocacy for foster-care children.

It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! confirms what we have all suspected: Washington and Wall Street have really screwed things up for the average American. Work has been devalued. Education costs are out of sight. Effort and ambition have never been so scantily rewarded. Political guru James Carville and pollster extraordinaire Stan Greenberg argue that our political parties must admit their failures and the electorate must reclaim its voice, because taking on the wealthy and the privileged is not class warfare—it is a matter of survival.

Here is the original manuscript of Raymond Carver's seminal 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver is one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature - his style is both instantly recognizable and hugely influential - and the pieces in What We Talk About..., which portray the gritty loves and lives of the American working class, are counted among the foundation stones of the contemporary short story.

Fifth-generation New Yorker, third-generation bartender, and first-generation author Tara Clancy was raised in three wildly divergent homes: a converted boat shed in working-class Queens; a geriatric commune of feisty, Brooklyn-born Italians; and a sprawling Hamptons estate she visited every other weekend. This childhood triptych comes to life in The Clancys of Queens, an electric, one-of-a-kind memoir.

Beginning with his first book, Shouting at No One, from 1983, and continuing through to So Where Are We?, from 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph's poetry "of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness" (John Ashbery), each poem "an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth" (Yusef Komunyakaa).