Before I lucked into an academic career and writing life, I spent a decade working construction, from repainting hundreds of student apartments to scraping paint off the third floor of a Victorian house to spraying fresh Sheetrock walls inside countless cookie-cutter houses in one of those suburbs that sprang up like wildflowers in the years just before the 2008 recession. I stayed in the trades for only ten years, but I’ve spent my writing life thinking about how to capture the complexities of labor in story.

My new story collection, Such a Good Man, features many construction workers on the job: plumbers, painters, roofers, but also bouncy house attendants, baseball players, aerial photographers. I’m fascinated by the language of labor, the poetry of each job’s tasks and tools, the lilting music of the often gruff shop-talk laced with eccentric expletives, the surprising intimacy of found-families at work set against the grinding reality of the work itself. What I hope of my work, and what I most admire about authors that write about work deeply, is the full complexity that constantly seesaws between nobility and grating honesty, the horror and the honor, the beauty and the pain. 

There are many beautiful books about working-class people, but I wanted to put together a list of books that don’t just explore the culture and experience of class, but books that dive into the job itself, that revel in the language of labor, that put their characters to work in scene rather than in the background. In Janet Zandy’s essential book Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work, she says true working-class literature takes us “into the skin of a worker,” into the “cadences, dialects, curtailed responses, directness of working-class speech…and always the graphic description of the physicality of labor.” That’s often the goal in my writing, and it’s certainly a triumph of the following twelve books of poetry and prose that depict not just working-class people but that foreground work as the feature. 

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

I also adore Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which depicts low-wage restaurant work in some of Orwell’s most scene-driven narrative. But The Road to Wigan Pier is an absolutely brilliant and insightful investigative piece into the work and conditions of coal miners. When I first read this, the television show Dirty Jobs was quite popular, and Orwell was doing something similar yet much more in-depth—full immersion into this very dangerous, dirty job. He depicts the human lives at the center of this work with great sensitivity, while also capturing the sensory pain of forever crouching so as not to bang your head on a rocky roof. The book goes on to discuss class consciousness and socialism in ways that still feel valid and important today. Beyond being fascinating and important, this is such an entertaining read. I’m a huge Orwell fan, but I actually find Animal Farm and 1984 overly didactic to the point of being a bit obvious. In my opinion, Orwell’s nonfiction is his most interesting work.

Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do by Studs Terkel

This book has been my personal bible about labor in America. I always keep this near my writing desk, and I reference it often for inspiration. For those unaware of this groundbreaking book, what Terkel did was interview more than one hundred people about their jobs. Then he removed himself and his questions from the text so that each section reads like a monologue, uninterrupted, voiced raw and gorgeous by these working identities, from carpenters to police officers, sex workers to nuns, dentists to cabdrivers, nurses to photographers. You can open up to any section and be swept into authenticity and rare insight, and every section sparkles like an uncut gem. Though published in 1974, this book holds up beautifully today. NPR has released some of the original recorded interviews that fed this book, which you can access online. 

Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature by Dorothy Allison

We’re still mourning the loss of Dorothy Allison, one of our greatest voices in American literature. This list is a perfect opportunity to talk about one of Allison’s lesser-discussed books. Skin is a collection of essays that are ahead of their time in intersectional discussions of class and sexuality. The first essay in the collection, “A Question of Class,” is a must-read treasure. In it, Allison so movingly explores her class identity and the jobs of her family members, the desperation, the affection, the cruelty, the prejudice, the love. It’s a beautiful, tough, wise essay, and the rest of the collection embraces discussions of work, class, and sex with similar luminescent bravery and brilliance. 

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Berlin is one of the greatest story writers of the ‘80s and ‘90s, who doesn’t get the attention of her Kmart realist siblings of working-class literature, like Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason. This collection of selected stories compiles many of her best stories, and in these masterful works we find such a keen eye for class commentary that never feels forced, and instead is funny, painful, ruminating, and so often keenly tuned into the details of labor. “My Jockey” is a perfect flash fiction story about work as a nurse. The title story is one that should be in every short story anthology for its innovative structure, its stunning voice, and especially its witty, piercing first-person perspective on this work that gives direct access to class comparisons; what better job to spy on how the other half lives and contemplate class in America? This essential book is packed full of great work stories. 

Punching Out by Jim Daniels

This ode to the auto factories of Detroit seethes with voice and character. The poems take us on an evolution from the new guy initiated into this factory city (and Daniels shows us how the factories were indeed cities with their own stores and hospitals housed within the labyrinthine behemoths) to the labor-hardened maturity needed to survive this grueling yet often intimate culture. What gives this dangerous factory work its surprising beauty are the eccentric characters who glimmer through the grease and grime. Daniels’s language is so richly grounded in the details and jargon of this factory work, and to read this collection is to come away feeling like an honorary citizen of the factory city, for better or worse. Of course, Daniels has written so many brilliant collections, and Punching Out is a classic. 

Redeployment by Phil Klay

This book is all about military service, but what distinguishes it from other war literature is the way Klay treats the subject like a day job, capturing the mundanity of even terrifying work: “PFC said, it’d be cool to get IEDed, long as no one got hurt.” This comes from the shortest story in the collection, “OIF,” which I teach my creative writing students every year. Every sentence is mired in military acronyms and initialisms, so many that it can feel like a slog the first few sentences. But that’s the point of this story and the whole collection (which is never a slog to read)—to initiate us into this working culture through immersion. In an interview, Klay once said: “Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility—it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain. You don’t honor someone by telling them, ‘I can never imagine what you’ve been through.’ Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels…” This collection accomplishes this breakthrough in empathy, just like the best of literature about work should all aspire to do, helping us to “try to imagine being in it.”

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell

When this came out in 2009, it was my first Bonnie Jo Campbell book, and I was blown away by how she grounds labor in place. I lived and worked in the Kalamazoo, Michigan area that provides the setting for the stories in this collection, a setting as crucial as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. The characters in this book are all working class, are often stretched to desperation’s brink while they survive around the tenuous time of Y2K and pre-recession. The historical manufacturing culture of Michigan industry has always made our rust-belt state a canary in the coal mine for national recessions, and you feel the great recession knocking at these characters’ doors. The stories often focus on jobs that reflect the titular concept of salvaging a living that comes after the good jobs have disappeared. Rather than make cars in the motor city, Campbell’s characters salvage parts. They hunt for the food they can no longer afford to buy. They profit from the paranoia of a world falling apart, selling propane to Y2K preppers. Campbell shows the ingenuity of working-class people pushed into survival, scrapping together a living any way they can. 

Orientation by Daniel Orozco

The title story in this collection is perhaps the most masterful office work story of the 2010s. Like so many, I loved the television series The Office, and this story picks up where the show leaves off by delving into the darkly haunting dehumanization of office life, despite all its benefits and HR correctness. Orozco pushes past absurd humor to show us the secret humanity and suffering of the office’s archetypal characters that we might laugh about at the surface level. The collection also includes stories about bridge workers and police officers on the job, always reminding us of the human cost of turning our bodies into machines to serve comfortable civilization. This collection is terrifying yet funny, accessible yet daringly experimental. 

The Cleaner by Brandi Wells

Wells’s debut novel takes us directly into the perspective of an invisible worker, the night cleaner at a white-collar office. The narrator shows us who knows our secret identities best—the person tidying up our lives stowed inside desk drawers and computer files. Though the day’s white-collar employees don’t know this narrator or her labor, she ponders them, their connections, their tribulations, their desires, through the detritus left between the regular nine to five hours. Similar to Orozco’s office fiction, this novel is also both funny and haunting, yet wholly unique. Wells so smartly illuminates the perceived arbitrary demarcations between white- and blue-collar labor and the common dehumanization so many of us share in common while on the clock. 

Pastoralia by George Saunders

I could pick any Saunders collection for its brilliant depictions of weird jobs, even if many of those jobs are completely surreal, like the narrator’s occupation in the titular novella Pastoralia. He works as a caveman in a live-action museum exhibit of human evolution that he can never leave. Interesting that this story gets its own evolution, in a way, in “Ghoul,” featured in his newest collection Liberation Day. “Sea Oak” is also a contemporary classic depicting food-service-sex-work in a gender reversal reflecting our own surreal American culture. In Saunders’s stories, capitalist anxiety always looms. I’m a big fan of this—using surrealism to mirror the absurdity of our working lives, the grinding repetition, the absurd way we’re required to monetize our time and bodies and efforts. 

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

So, who better to push the absurdity of American working culture than one of Saunders’s students? Adjei-Brenyah picks up where Saunders leaves off, especially exploring the absurdity of retail labor and consumerism in the title story, “Friday Black,” as well as in “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” and “In Retail.” These stories push deeply into horrors of consumer culture, and he explores even racial violence being commodified in a Saunders-style grotesque amusement park in “Zimmer Land.” I also deeply admired Adjei-Brenyah’s brilliant novel Chain-Gang All-Stars, which, I think, builds off themes initiated in this collection to explore a dystopic future where America’s terrifying history of prison labor has turned into coliseum games. 

Temporary by Hilary Leichter

In Adam Petty’s astute essay “Dirty Life and Times: The Past, Present and Future of Working-Class Literature,” he asks a question: “We’ve had Kmart realism; why not Walmart realism?” Or what about Amazon realism? It’s certainly going to get surreal, globalized and computerized, guided by algorithm, surely even more alienating. Saunders led the way, and Hilary Leichter pushes the tradition forward with her highly stylized, experimental novel Temporary. Here the narrator weaves between temporary jobs, though each one seems to encompass an inescapable universe. This novel is full of humor, while also taking very seriously the cruelty of our modern world that makes every worker expendable, no matter how essential. The narrator searches for permanence in this picaresque plot of temporary jobs, but no such anchor is to be found in this magical labor-led universe that funhouse-mirrors our own. There’s so much gritty authenticity in the details of labor, as the jobs flit between realistic and absurd: pirate-deck swabber, door opener, assassin assistant, pamphlet distributor, replacement mother. Even the narrator’s lovers, a swarm of boyfriends she speaks to over the phone, are a writhing mass of slipping identities that require yet more labor.