The semiautobiographical story of an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame.

Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in...

"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"--

Distraught over the deaths of her husband and son in a suicide bombing at a London soccer match, a woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden to persuade him to abandon his terror campaign

Fourteen-year-old Chris, a poor relation of the wealthy Winchesters, must chose whether to be on the side of management or labor when his classmates' parents go on strike at the Winchester mill in response to a wage cut

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize: A novel of two 'wonderful characters' who meet by accident in Edwardian England, and fall inconveniently in love (The Washington Post). In 1912, rational scientist Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger-fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, and almost pathologically generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications-not...

A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.

A collection of interviews with working people in a wide variety of occupations.

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...

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from...