100 books like Long Live the Post Horn!

Though this book is largely about the toxic extramarital affair between a young black girl and a married white man, it shines light on the competitive work environment between editors in publishing.

It also becomes satire in its depiction of what kind of works from Black authors publishers are keen on commissioning. Cue in its critique of the proliferation of slave narratives in publishing, and this funny, sexy, and deeply sad novel will leave a huge mark on readers. 

Exalted follows two women, Emily, an Internet astrologer, and Dawn, a lesbian waitress looking for a connection of any sort.

Dorn’s writing is sharp and funny as she tracks the way that both women are forced to scrape together a living. I love to see a character at work, and Emily’s wry sense of humor as she manipulates viral trends and conjures somewhat bogus readings is a powerful engine for the story.

As the novel progresses, the main characters’ lives begin to overlap, and you begin to wonder whether some destinies are really written in the stars as any good astrologer would insist. 

This is a gorgeously written book about two best friends doing nothing in particular. Isa and Gala arrive in New York City intertwined and allied.

They whirl through all the requisite stops of the party girl layabout lifestyle. I was fascinated by the friendship’s closeness; Isa and Gala know each other’s quirks and fears in staggering intimacy. They function as a unit, as a “we.” Isa’s aimlessly wandering through life, but she isn’t in it alone, and that’s comforting to me.

Together, Isa and Gala turn aimlessness into freedom. It’s a detail-packed, slow-burning portrait of how we build identity together, intertwining ourselves and pushing each other forward.

I spent my summers during college doing odd jobs as a temp, but even readers who’ve never known anything but “the steadiness” at work will enjoy this mythical look at the gig economy.

The unnamed narrator, born from a long line of temps, takes pride in her ability to “accurately replace a person,” whether that’s a pirate, an assassin, or even the chairman of the board. This book is for anyone who’s ever wondered what it would take not just to survive their job but to transcend it.

Domestic workers, among the most exploited of the world’s working classes, knew they deserved more and believed the work they did – caring for the children, the disabled, the elderly – should be honored.

They organized first in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Soon the movement spread across the world. Jennifer Fish travels with the movement, from Cape Town to Geneva, Montevideo, and beyond. Like the women she befriends, Fish believes in the power of community and of what can be achieved when workers imagine the world they want and start moving together toward it.

There’s no better book about international worker solidarity and the power of thinking and acting both local and global.

Dalton was a wonderful poet and radical activist tragically executed by his Salvadorean comrades in 1975 when they erroneously believed him to be working for the CIA. The Salvadorean left has a poor record in devouring its own in bouts of paranoia that attended the civil war of the 1980s. Marmol, who survived deep into old age, was a ringleader of an uprising in 1932 that briefly promised a peasant overthrow of a state controlled by an oligarchy of a dozen families. The uprising was repressed with such force that the military was able to retain political power for the next four decades. This book is beautifully written and translated wonderfully well by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross.

The literature on Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and their boycott campaigns is quite extensive. Matt Garcia’s is one of the best accounts of the Farm Workers’ strategy of boycotting grapes, lettuce, and other items to build power and win a union. What I especially appreciate about Garcia’s account is, first, his focus on the innovations in consumer activism brought about by the UFW. Organizers and workers made their boycott succeed by going into cities, living together in boycott houses, and appealing to urban consumers. Garcia’s accounts of boycott houses and organizers’ efforts from Los Angeles to Toronto and London are excellent. Second, Garcia doesn’t stray from critiquing the boycott tactic and noting places where it fell short – making this a cautionary tale for activists today.

Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?

Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.

Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.  

Steven Greenhouse, who spent decades as The New York Times' labor reporter, writes as good a survey of the state of the present-day labor movement as you can find anywhere.

Uber drivers, health care workers, auto workers, and more, this is a book for anyone who wonders where union power stands, how it’s gotten here, and who the players are who are trying to revive unions for a new century.

I have long been a fan of stories about courageous women and I love it when I discover a book for young readers that brings to life an inspiring story of someone they may not know well (or at all). That’s exactly what Warren does in this book about Delores Huerta. The text works well for even the youngest readers. It promotes empathy by describing the poor living conditions of migrant children and their parents. Its themes are as relevant today as they were in Delores’ time. We need to care, we need to stand up for others, we need to be fair. It’s beautifully illustrated, too.