Books like 'Working'
Readers who enjoyed Working by Studs Terkel also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century psychological journalism politics classics working-class university social-commentary
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Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsWoman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town...Categorized as:
classics politics social-commentary university 20th-century adult book coming-of-age -
![Animal Farm / 1984 by George Orwell]()
Animal Farm / 1984 by George Orwell
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 72 ratingsThis edition features George Orwell’s best-known novels—1984 and Animal Farm—with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary organisation called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party...Categorized as:
classics politics social-commentary university 20th-century alternate-history animals audiobook -
![The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett]()
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsNobel prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. He gives expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature... -
![Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose]()
Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA landmark American drama that inspired a classic film and a Broadway revival—featuring an introduction by David MametA blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic faith in the U.S. legal system... -
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![The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot]()
The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratings"This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper." 'The Hollow Men' is a poem by T. S. Eliot written in 1925, divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines. Eliot's New York Times obituary in 1965 identified the final four as "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English"...Categorized as:
classics university fiction 20th-century existentialism historical philosophy psychological -
![Roman Fever (and Other Stories) by Edith Wharton]()
Roman Fever (and Other Stories) by Edith Wharton
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA Virago Modern Classic These stories - all powerful moral analyses - demonstrate the true professionalism of Edith Wharton... -
![Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina]()
Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAnnadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy -- land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women...Categorized as:
classics politics university north-america usa west-virginia historical-fiction fiction -
![U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money by John Dos Passos]()
U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money by John Dos Passos
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn the novels that make up the U.S.A.trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A... -
![Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker]()
Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsPossessing the Secret of Joy is the story of Tashi, a tribal African woman who lives much of her adult life in North America. As a young woman, a misguided loyalty to the customs of her people led her to voluntarily submit to the tsunga's knife and be genitally mutilated (pharoanoically circumcised)... -
![Marat Sade by Peter Weiss]()
Marat Sade by Peter Weiss
Rated: 4.03 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsThis extraordinary play, which swept Europe before coming to America, is based on two historical truths: the infamous Marquis de Sade was confined in the lunatic asylum of Charenton, where he staged plays; and the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in a bathtub by Charlotte Corday at the height of the Terror during the French Revolution. But this play-within-a-play is not historical drama... -
![Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 by Vladimir Nabokov]()
Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis Library of America volume is the second of three volumes that contain the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time...Categorized as:
classics politics fiction literary-fiction humor 20th-century psychological historical -
![The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre]()
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSet in France during the days immediately before World War II, this is the story of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy obsessed with the idea of freedom. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton... -
![Corregidora by Gayl Jones]()
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of The New Yorker's "The Best Books We Read in 2020" picks"Jones's great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them."--Anna Wiener, The New YorkerThe new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery... -
![The Conformist by Alberto Moravia]()
The Conformist by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSecrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years... -
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![House Taken Over by Julio Cortázar]()
House Taken Over by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"Casa Tomada" (English: "House Taken Over") is a 1946 short story by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. It was originally published in Los anales de Buenos Aires, a literary magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges, and later included in his volume of stories, Bestiario.It tells the story of a brother and sister living together in their ancestral home which is being "taken over" by unknown entities...Categorized as:
classics politics university fiction horror magical-realism literary-fiction fantasy -
![Passing by Nella Larsen]()
Passing by Nella Larsen
Rated: 3.95 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsFirst published to critical acclaim in 1929, Passing firmly established Nella Larsen's prominence among women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The Modern Library is proud to present Passing — an electrifying story of two women who cross the color line in 1920s New York—together with a new Introduction by the Obie Award- winning playwright and novelist Ntozake Shange... -
![Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler]()
Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA young woman is contacted by her mother, begging her to save her father from debtor's jail by visiting an elderly acquaintance in order to borrow money. This novel shows how the demands of her family force Else into the realization that everything has a price and morality has a most brittle veneer... -
![Amongst Women by John McGahern]()
Amongst Women by John McGahern
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMoran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerilla leader in the War of Independence. Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past... -
![Swann in Love by Marcel Proust]()
Swann in Love by Marcel Proust
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe newest translation of the classic of French literature From the text: But at the age Swann was approaching, where one is already a little disillusioned and where he knows to be content at being in love simply for the pleasure of it, without demanding too much in return, this coming together of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one's youth, the goal that love, by necessity, tends... -
![American Pastoral by Philip Roth]()
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsPulitzer Prize Winner (1998)In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss...Categorized as:
classics politics social-commentary university 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook -
![The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow]()
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted... -
![1934: A Novel by Alberto Moravia]()
1934: A Novel by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsMoravia's political fable about an Italian anti-Fascist and the frightened, suicide-seeking German girl he encounters on a boat to Capri--the setting of Moravia's Il disprezzo from 1954--was welcomed as one of his finest novels...Categorized as:
classics politics fiction 20th-century historical historical-fiction psychological book -
![Quartet by Jean Rhys]()
Quartet by Jean Rhys
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe story of a woman on the edge caught in the stranglehold between her lover and his wife. When her husband is released from prison, the situation explodes... -
![The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams]()
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow, recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging ("The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten... -
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![Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) by André Malraux]()
Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) by André Malraux
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAs explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to life the profound meaning of the revolutionary impulse for the individuals involved... -
![The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon]()
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Rated: 3.70 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsMeet Moses, Galahad, Big City, Tolroy, Five Past Twelve, and other West Indians who have come to London in search of the dream. There to face a reality of racial discrimination, poverty, harsh winters, waiting to see what tomorrow brings. This novel both joyful and sad, is an ode to the survival instinct of the modern immigrant... -
![Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos]()
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsConsidered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike... -
![Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan]()
Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTristessa is the name with which Kerouac baptized Esperanza Villanueva, a Catholic Mexican young woman, a prostitute and addict to certain drugs, whom he fell in love with during one of his stays in Mexico -a country that he frequently visited - by the middle of the fifties... -
![The Tenants by Bernard Malamud]()
The Tenants by Bernard Malamud
Rated: 3.58 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsIn The Tenants (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building... -
![Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis]()
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Rated: 3.65 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsProsperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appears to have everything a man could wish: good health, a fine family, and a profitable business in a booming Midwestern city. But the middle-aged real estate agent is shaken from his self-satisfaction by a growing restlessness with the limitations of his life... -
![Walden Two by B.F. Skinner]()
Walden Two by B.F. Skinner
Rated: 3.51 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsThis fictional outline of a modern utopia has been a center of controversy since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct... -
![The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen]()
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Rated: 3.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II.Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay...
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