The Jungle prompted the immediate passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and launched Upton Sinclair's career as a champion of the working class. This quintessential muckraking novel changed the course of history with its gruesomely detailed depiction of Chicago's meat-packing industry. By following Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus's descent through the brutal? bloody hell of "Packingtown" and Chicago's seamy web of graft and corruption? Sinclair...

Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in...

"'Mika, you sit at our feet all these hours and days, hearing us tell our tales. You have all these stories inside you: all the stories everyone in our family knows and all the stories everyone in our family tells. You write 'em in your books and show everyone who we are.' So begins DéLana R.A. Dameron's stunning novel-in-stories, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Mosby spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their...

"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"--