Here are 100 books that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline fans have personally recommended if you like
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My grandfather was a labour activist in Hull in the UK and my father had many classic labour texts such as the book by Tressell, listed below. That got me interested in the world of work and later more specifically in managing people. I moved from studying economics to employment relations /human resource management. Given that most of us (workers) spend 80,000 hours of our lives at work - more time than we are likely to spend on any other activity during our lifetimes - how we spend these lives has remained a source of fascination
It is a rich and memorable oral history of America told by more than a hundred workers across a huge slice of American working life including those of paperboys, photographers, switchboard operators, actors, writers, executives, barbers, sanitation truck drivers, stockbrokers, professional athletes, teachers, grave diggers, lettuce pickers and many more.
It shows how work is a search for both a daily crust and meaning. The book inspired a musical and a recent Netflix series with Obama as the host.
Perhaps Studs Terkel's best-known book, Working is a compelling, fascinating look at jobs and the people who do them. Consisting of over one hundred interviews conducted with everyone from gravediggers to studio heads, this book provides a timeless snapshot of people's feelings about their working lives, as well as a relevant and lasting look at how work fits into American life.
Growing up in Scott, Louisiana, I didn’t know that everyone else in the United States did not get Mardi Gras off from school and work. I thought everyone knew some French. Crawfish boils were a natural, expectable part of every spring. South Louisiana is a world unto itself. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate my heritage, my Cajun lineage, and the sometimes-befuddling ways we Louisianians look at that world. Between conversations with elders, reading historical documents, and even looking at land transfer maps, I’ve become even more grounded in what being from this little wet corner of the world means.
This Pulitzer Prize winner remains a time-tested testament to the absurdity that is New Orleans.
I felt like I’d met every one of the characters at least twice in my own walks on the streets of this storied city. I could even taste the Lucky Dogs. This is one of the few books to have me consistently laugh out loud. You can even take a picture with the statue of Ignatius J Reilly (the main character) on Canal Street.
'This is probably my favourite book of all time' Billy Connolly
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole's larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans, beautifully resigned with cover art by Gary Taxali _____________
'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me.'
Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much…
I grew up in a woman-centered household, the youngest with two older sisters. I was the only child of my mother’s second marriage, and a space of ten and twelve years separated me from my sisters. My sisters and mother always felt like an intense unit that didn’t include me, and that yearning and outsider status defined my life and made me a lover of books about mothers and daughters and the female world.
I read this book in graduate school at the University of Washington, where Robinson had also been a graduate student. What struck me so forcefully was how the father is killed off in a train wreck at the beginning of the novel to usher in the exploration of the female life of generations of women.
No work before made me see how a male character and tradition can marginalize female life. This novel encouraged me to focus on my mother and sisters in my own writing.
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.
The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized…
The first story I ever wrote was set among warehouse pickers and stockers; the second, a bridge maintenance crew; the third and fifth, office workers, and the sixth, cops on the beat. I’m fascinated by the drama of work. For most people the workplace is a highly structured environment—you can’t wear what you want, you can’t say what you want, you can’t avoid that guy who drives you nuts. Who-You-Really-Are and Who-You-Are-At-Work are not always in harmony, and the tension between those two identities is richly revelatory. I live and write in Moscow, Idaho, and have taught creative writing at the University of Idaho, Stanford University, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
This is the drama of a twenty-second escalator ride, during which the narrator, returning to the office from lunch, ponders his morning at work and his just-ended lunch hour, and reflects upon just about everything that he has observed or handled on this day (sunlight, shoelaces, staplers, doorknobs, carpet, rubber stamps, popcorn, and yes, escalators), and on every seemingly insignificant and fleeting human activity he has engaged in (tying his shoelace, signing a co-worker’s get-well card, replacing a wastepaper basket bag, avoiding another co-worker, ending a conversation). Though an office drone with a boring job, he remains undefeated, and engages the mundane and the routine around him with joy and renewal and wonder. A very funny and heartfelt book.
The Mezzanine is the story of one man's lunch hour. Pondering life's littlest questions - why does one shoelace always wear out before the other? Whatever happened to the paper drinking straw - our narrator interrogates the inner-workings of corporate living as he traipses his way down escalators to the first floor and through the mundaneness of office life.
Mixing humour with the existentialism that surrounds all our working lives, The Mezzanine is a classic work of modern American literature.
The first story I ever wrote was set among warehouse pickers and stockers; the second, a bridge maintenance crew; the third and fifth, office workers, and the sixth, cops on the beat. I’m fascinated by the drama of work. For most people the workplace is a highly structured environment—you can’t wear what you want, you can’t say what you want, you can’t avoid that guy who drives you nuts. Who-You-Really-Are and Who-You-Are-At-Work are not always in harmony, and the tension between those two identities is richly revelatory. I live and write in Moscow, Idaho, and have taught creative writing at the University of Idaho, Stanford University, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
One early summer afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from the mud of Lake Vättern, and Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Swedish National Police is assigned to the case. Who was she? Who killed her? These questions remain unanswered for months and months (and months). Catching a killer, it seems, is a slog, and the routines of police work are captured here in all their tedium. And this is exactly why I love this book, as it compellingly dramatizes (to quote from Henning Mankell’s introduction) “the fundamental virtue of the police: patience.” There’s a heroism to these steadfast and rumpled men, and something thrilling about their dogged, often frustrating, yet ultimately successful pursuit of the truth.
With a New Introduction by Henning Mankell. The masterful first novel in the Martin Beck series of mysteries by the internationally renowned crime writing duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö ("the best writers of police procedurals in the world"), finds Beck hunting for the murderer of a lonely traveler. On a July afternoon, a young woman's body is dredged from Sweden's beautiful Lake Vattern. With no clues Beck begins an investigation not only to uncover a murderer but also to discover who the victim was. Three months later, all Beck knows is that her name was Roseanna and that she…
The first story I ever wrote was set among warehouse pickers and stockers; the second, a bridge maintenance crew; the third and fifth, office workers, and the sixth, cops on the beat. I’m fascinated by the drama of work. For most people the workplace is a highly structured environment—you can’t wear what you want, you can’t say what you want, you can’t avoid that guy who drives you nuts. Who-You-Really-Are and Who-You-Are-At-Work are not always in harmony, and the tension between those two identities is richly revelatory. I live and write in Moscow, Idaho, and have taught creative writing at the University of Idaho, Stanford University, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
During Italy’s post-WWII economic boom of the ‘50s, in an anonymous northern Italian city, an unskilled laborer named Marcovaldo struggles to support his wife and five children (or seven, or four—the number changes). In twenty tightly-plotted tales, we observe him stealing a trout, stealing a rabbit, getting lost in the fog, shoveling sidewalks, trying to fall asleep, trying to stay warm in the winter. Each “adventure” complicates absurdly, and some are more dire than others. Though on the brink of poverty, Marcovaldo hangs on, strives and fails, and strives anew, never losing his naive sense that things will turn out fine. The best comic writing is always tinged with the tragic, making you laugh and making you feel, and Calvino is a master.
Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems.
Before there was an interdisciplinary academic field called “Animal Studies,” I was involved in these issues as an animal rights activist. Back then, the question of the animal was not taken seriously in academia as a free-standing problem (like gender or sexuality or race). It was important to me to build that—not just to take seriously the lives of animals, but also to show how the animal issue opens onto a much broader set of fundamental questions about the human and its place in relation to ecology, technology, and the non-human world. That’s why the book series I founded is devoted not to Animal Studies, but to Posthumanism.
Nobel-prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee is not known for dodging big questions and moral gravitas, and my pick here is no exception.
The Lives of Animals would seem to be the logical choice (and with it, the novel that eventually emerged from it, Elizabeth Costello of 2003). But I’m going with his earlier novel, Disgrace (published the same year as Lives, 1999), because I think it’s the stronger book, and by that I mean more unsettling, more challenging.
Disgrace captures how the most intense and meaningful episodes in our moral lives can nevertheless be opaque and, in a sense, unfathomable. And few books demonstrate in a “show don’t tell” way just how intertwined race, sexuality, and animality are in our moral drama.
From the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.
"Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." -The New Yorker
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an…
I’m the author of Fraternity: Stories. I don’t consider myself a fraternity bro, but I hold the Greek men and women I write about very close to my heart because I know the feeling of being young and lost and wanting a guidebook for behavior, and how easily the young can be exiled, in one way or another, by their peers. I feel for every young person who’s disgraced and humiliated, whether it’s on social media or in a tumbledown colonial with wooden letters nailed to the front. I also feel for every young person who lives in fear of disgrace and humiliation.
Times in my life when I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought, while making those choices: To hell with you people, I don’t care what you think of me, I’m going to be my own person, screw appearances and reputation. Other times I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought: I’m doing what’s expected of me, that’s all. This collection of short stories offers a gallery of complex and warm characters, some of whom disgrace themselves via transgression, some via passivity.
An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time
"I can't recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I'm shocked and scandalized. She's brilliant, this young woman."-David Sedaris
Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won…
Throughout my teenage and early adult years, I experienced episodes of mental illness. Thankfully, it seems to be behind me, but it's not something I’ll ever forget, and I find myself deeply intrigued by the manifestations of those darker aspects in others. Some people hurt themselves and some hurt others, the common thread is the presence of pain and suffering. As heartrending as this reality is, it holds a certain fascination for me, both in real life and in literature. That’s why I write about it; that’s why I read about it.
I recommend this book because, to me, it is unique–I’ve never read a book like it. It’s an interesting plot, end-of-the-world stuff, with some very unlikeable, low-life characters. It’s set in a very dark version of London that I know and love, in a pub environment similar to the one that I grew up in.
There is murder on the cards throughout the story, but the author still manages to squeeze in some humor. It’s just a different style of writing that I think people should give a try.
London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium—"a comic murder mystery, an apocalyptic satire, a scatological meditation on love and death" (The New York Times).
The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?
Here, Amis is "by turns lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." —Michiko Kakutani
I’m the author of Fraternity: Stories. I don’t consider myself a fraternity bro, but I hold the Greek men and women I write about very close to my heart because I know the feeling of being young and lost and wanting a guidebook for behavior, and how easily the young can be exiled, in one way or another, by their peers. I feel for every young person who’s disgraced and humiliated, whether it’s on social media or in a tumbledown colonial with wooden letters nailed to the front. I also feel for every young person who lives in fear of disgrace and humiliation.
My wife and I and half of our friends have had the same experience reading this book, namely, bursting into tears while reading it on the subway. About half the stories in this collection have endings that are devastating/ecstatic gut punches, and the reason is that they are explorations of disgrace. Curtis is hilarious, but the everyday ostracizations that befall the young women in this book would tear you apart even if they weren’t funny.
In this dazzling literary debut, Rebecca Curtis displays the gifts that make her one of the most talented writers of her generation. Her characters—young women struggling to find happiness, love, success, security, and adventure—wait tables, run away from home, fall for married men, betray their friends, and find themselves betrayed as well.
In "Hungry Self," a young waitress descends into the basement of a seemingly ordinary Chinese restaurant; in "Twenty Grand," a young wife tries to recover her lost fortune; in "Monsters," one family's paranoia leads to a sacrifice; and in "The Witches," an innocent swim on prom night proves…
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