Comics impresario Harvey Pekar brings to vivid life Terkel's bestselling masterpiece, with comics by America's leading illustrators
Ever since Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel's Working first documented American workers' hopes and dreams, that "deep penetration of American thought and feeling" (Los Angeles Times) has sold over a million copies, captivating readers with accounts of how their fellow citizens make a living.

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In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life. This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills...

In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyses how [the] choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers- including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more- and the melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins to "become someone," only to find that they lose themselves in the process.

"Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. 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, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you...

His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job. Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labor in the pits of his small town. But the world is changing, and, lying next to him, Conn's father Tam has decided that his son's life will be different from his own. Gritty, dark...

"A deep and troubling examination of the dark corners of working-class America, where unemployment and the loss of traditional jobs have produced an epidemic of drug abuse, bigotry, and even suicide, coupled with an urgent plea to rearrange our priorities to address the ills of middle America and emphasize the common good"-- "Is America in a state of irrevocable decline? In this provocative and disturbing examination of our country, Pulitzer Prize-winning...

Loafers, loungers, and malingers of the world, this is your manifesto. Though it may sound like little more than a slacker's bill of rights, Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy is actually a carefully considered philosophical defense of a life free of the demands of labor that is carried out purely in the service of capitalism. The thinker was true to his belief system, dying in a joint suicide pact with his wife (who happened to be Karl

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Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show in this book, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today's trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the...

This 1867 volume contains twenty-five letters written by Ruskin to Mr. Thomas Dixon, a working cork-cutter of Sunderland, on the occasion of debates over Parliamentary reform in the area of workers' rights.

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.