At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams -- breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest, attending a university, and becoming a writer -- were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, working days and taking college classes online. She also began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans....

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...

"From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and...

Rick Bragg concludes his family stories with a tale of fathers and sons inspired by his own relationship with his ten-year-old stepson. Having married a mother, he discovers that he is unsuited to fatherhood, to this boy in particular, a boy accustomed to love and affection rather than violence and neglect -- a boy wholly unlike the child Rick once was. With the weight of this new boy tugging at him, Rick sets out to understand his father, his son,...

A collection of works, both fictional and non-fictional, gathered together here for the first time --

Her rallying cry was famous: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." A century ago, Mother Jones was a celebrated organizer and agitator, the very soul of the modern American labor movement. At coal strikes, steel strikes, railroad, textile, and brewery strikes, Mother Jones was always there, stirring the workers to action and enraging the powerful. In this first biography of "the most dangerous woman in America, " Elliott J. Gorn...

"The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, JR Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means...

Features an interview with historian Elliott Gorn (in color). In mostly black and white still photographs and a segment of motion picture footage of Mother Jones at age "100", her story recalls the terrible conditions and labor oppression that motivated her to travel the country, mobilizing thousands of workers to fight for a living wage.