"With Empire Falls Richard Russo cements his reputation as one of America's most compelling and compassionate storytellers. 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...

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then...

"A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party,"--NoveList.

An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old...

"This sweeping history of classical economics shows how the work ethic has been used both to oppress workers and to liberate them. Today's neoliberalism offers an oppressive version of the work ethic. However, the work ethic also offers resources for reorganizing the economy on behalf of ordinary people"--

"In the 1950s, Ellie and Brick are teenagers in love. A basketball star, Brick could escape his abusive father and be the first person in his working-class family to go to college. But when Ellie becomes pregnant, they marry, she gives up her dream of nursing school, and Brick gets a union card instead. This riveting novel tells the story of three generations in a working-class family; especially Brick and Ellie's daughter Samantha. Illuminating issues...

After Eddie Pettit is killed, Maisie begins searching for answers in the working-class streets of Lambeth where Eddie lived, but the inquiry leads to a 'has been' politician named Winston Churchill and the husband of her dearest friend, and it becomes clear that powerful forces are determined to prevent Maisie from learning the truth.

"After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united, and--until God seems to turn His back on their boy Fish--religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords. Change, hardship, and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering house called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years, they...

"Saint Petersburg, 1812. Russian forces have defeated Napoleon at great cost, and the tsar's empire is once again at peace. Sasha, a captain in the Imperial Army, returns home to Grand Duke Felix, the disgraced second son of the tsar as well as his irrepressibly charming lover. However, their reunion is quickly interrupted by the arrival of Sofia, a mysteirously persuasive figure whose disruptive presence Sasha suspects to be something more than human....