King Coal

Germinal

Emile Zola · 496 pages

The thirteenth novel in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he disco

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 95 pages

Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 553 pages

Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Robert Tressell · 608 pages

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

Hard Times

Charles Dickens · 299 pages

Dickens scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy, Hard Times features schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, one of his most richly dimensional, memorable characters. Filled with the details and wonders of small-town life, it is also a daring novel of ideas and ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and limitless possibilities of the imagination.

The Running Man

Stephen King · 256 pages

The runaway bestseller about the ultimate reality showThe year is 2025. The Running Man is America's favorite television game show. Ben Richards is the program's latest contestant-and the Hunters' latest target in a rigged game of death…

The Gift of a Cow: A Translation from the Hindi Novel

Munshi Premchand

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)

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe · 690 pages

Love on the Dole

Walter Greenwood · 256 pages

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.

The Stars Look Down

A.J. Cronin · 608 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

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

Life in the Iron Mills

Rebecca Harding Davis · 443 pages

This definitive edition reprints the text of Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills together with a broad selection of historical and cultural documents that open up the novella to the consideration of a range social and cultural issues vital to Davis's nineteenth century. Special attention is given to nineteenth-century American discussions of work and social class, moral and social refor

The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought

The Nether World

George Gissing · 392 pages

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.

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser · 831 pages

The classic depiction of the harsh realities of American life, the dark side of the American Dream, and one man's doomed pursuit of love and success..."Mr. Dreiser is not imitative and belongs to no school. He is at heart a mysticist and a fatalist, though using the realistic method. He is, on the evidence of this novel alone, a power." --The New York Times Book Review

Jews Without Money

Michael Gold, Howard Simon · 309 pages

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York

Stephen Crane · 239 pages

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller · 139 pages

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupporta

A Child of the Jago

Arthur Morrison · 322 pages