What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorStuds Lonigan
James T. Farrell · 819 pages
[William V. Lipton][1] from Ann Arbor, MI says: "This is both a coming-of-age novel and a social history. Set during the 1920s and 1930s, it follows Studs as he grows through his teen years in Chicago. It shows the influences on urban children, the stresses on families and the American society during that time. The characters and dialogue are captivating." ([on Flashlight Worthy][2]) [1]:
Native Son
Richard Wright · 398 pages
Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: [Early Works](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506449W)
A Walk on the Wild Side
Nelson Algren · 346 pages
With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern
Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh · 352 pages
Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, is a collection of short-stories revolving around a group of friends, their drug use, and struggles in the city of Edinburgh.
Rickshaw Boy
Lao She
First published in China in 1937, *Rickshaw Boy* is the story of Xiangzi, an honest and serious country boy who works as a rickshaw puller in Beijing. A man of simple needs whose greatest ambition is to one day own his own rickshaw, Xiangzi is nonetheless thwarted, time and again, in his attempts to improve his lot in life. One of the most important and popular works of twentieth-century Chinese
A Violent Life
Pier Paolo Pasolini · 320 pages
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages
A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in
Third Life Of Grange Copeland
Alice Walker · 302 pages
"Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third and final cha
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 342 pages
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 c
Little Man, What Now?
Hans Fallada · 383 pages
First published in Germany in 1932, Fallada's documentary novel is a portrait of Germany during its period of economic and political breakdown prior to the advent of Hitler.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
August Wilson · 111 pages
Presents the script for a two-act play set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927 where African-American band members and blues singer Ma Rainey reveal the conflicted feelings they have about their status in the white man's world.
Mary Barton
Elizabeth Gaskell · 417 pages
Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner's son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Through Mary's dilemma, and the moving portrayal of he
The Pearl
John Steinbeck · 118 pages
Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.
The Tin Flute
Gabrielle Roy · 393 pages
A family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance while searching for love.
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser · 450 pages
Young Caroline Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and New York.
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo · 747 pages
In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
Walter Mosley · 208 pages
Socrates Fortlow is Walter Mosley's most compelling character since Easy Rawlins, a tough, brooding ex-convict and is set to be a bold and original new hero.
The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he
Tomorrow Will Be Better
Betty Smith · 274 pages
**A timeless classic! *''Tomorrow Will Be Better''*** is a heartwarming story of love and marriage from ***Betty Smith***, the beloved author of ***''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.''*** **Set in the Williamsburg and Bushwick sections of Brooklyn in the 1920s**, ***''Tomorrow Will Be Better''*** is the story of Margy Shannon—shy, eager, joyfully optimistic—and her search for something better from lif
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Alan Sillitoe · 219 pages
xi, 244, [3] p., [10] p. of plates : 20 cm
Midnight Cowboy
James Leo Herlihy · 253 pages