The horrifying conditions of the Chicago stockyards are revealed through this narrative of a young immigrant's struggles in America.

At the country's edge, on the Mexican border, Brownsville, Texas, is a town like many others. It is a place where people work hard to create better lives for their children, where people bear grudges against their neighbors, where love blossoms only to fade, and where the only real certainty is that life holds surprises.

In England three working-class buddies, united by pub-drinking and World War II experiences, drive the ashes of the fourth to the sea. In the process emerge the lives of four families and the reason no wife came. By the author of Ever after.

"Working all day at a lathe leaves Arthur Seaton with energy to spare in the evenings. A young rebel of a man, he knows what he wants and he's sharp enough to get it. Before long his meetings with a couple of married women are part of local gossip." --

"Sterling Beckenbauer is plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world one morning when they are attacked, then unfairly arrested, in their neighborhood in London. With the help of their friends, Sterling hosts a trial of their own in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account"--

The ruthlessly ambitious Joe Lampton rises swiftly from the petty bureaucracy of local government into the world of inherited wealth, fast cars and glamorous women. But betrayal and tragedy strike as the original 'angry young man' of the fifties pursues his goals.

"[This book] is the remarkably mature and agile debut story collection from James Alan McPherson, one of America's most venerated and most original writers. McPherson's characters--gritty, authentic, and pristinely rendered--give voice to unheard struggles along the dividing lines of race and poverty in subtle, fluid prose that bears no trace of sentimentality, agenda, or apology."--From publisher's description.

"Homesick and alone, a teen-aged girl arrives in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer"

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...