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I have been researching the changes in the workplace for 40 years now. The steady move over that time has been away from a situation where employers controlled the development of their “talent” and managed it carefully, especially for white-collar workers, toward arrangements that are much more arms-length where employees are on their own to develop their skills and manage their career. Most employees now see at least some management practices that just don’t make sense even for their own employer–casual approaches to hiring, using “leased employees” and contractors, who are paid more, to do the same work as employees, leaving vacancies open, and so forth.
This is a classic oral history of jobs in what older people call “the good old days.” It is told from the perspective of the individuals doing the jobs they were talking about, and it reveals how interesting their day-to-day experience is.
The reminder for today, especially in our remote workplaces, is how important relationships with people at work are to our happiness and well-being. It’s also a reminder of how important it is for people to have some control over what they do and to feel invested in their work.
People want to do things well and take pride in what they do. We forget all this when we think of workers as widgets to be optimized.
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.
What happens when you’re face-to-face with a truth that shakes you? Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?
Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this question—what Homer called passing through The…
The last story in my collection is a 13,000-word contemplation about laziness (titled "Indolence: Notebooks"). Of course, paradoxically, to write about laziness (or read about it) is to succumb to it. Diligence is often paired with "virtue" or determination. But I've been fascinated with the flip side; what are the positive aspects of inaction, procrastination, or daydreaming? Some people always try to look and stay busy, while others avoid work shamelessly at all costs.
True Story: after an exhausting day teaching classes at an overseas college, I looked out my window and saw two shepherds seated comfortably against a tree, yawning as they watched their sheep grazing in the field. Ahh, what price civilization!?
Nothing much seems to happen in this remarkable novella, which describes a single lunch break of a man at work.
Actually, though, the reader gets to eavesdrop on the man’s ruminations about everyday things—shoelaces, bathroom blow dryers, vending machines, office supplies, and so much more.
These ruminations are practically Proustian; they start with something ordinary (a milk carton), followed by a digression (memories of having milk delivered to his home), interrupted by another digression (about his sister’s milk allergy), and veering into philosophical territory (pondering the nature of all childhood memories).
Reading this novella is both exhausting and exhilarating. It’s like wandering haphazardly through a maze of ideas and memories. Luckily, the novella is short enough that the reader never grows bored or tired.
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…
From Pulitzer Finalist Laurie Sheck (A Monster's Notes), a new speculative literary fiction in the spirit of Italo Calvino, Umberto Ecco and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing inhumanism.
I’m an Irish novelist and occasional screenwriter. My latest book, Duffy and Son, is my sixth. I can be drawn in by any well-told tale, of course, but I’ve always had the strongest reaction to stories with at least some element of comedy. I don’t know, I just find books in which no one says anything funny to be deeply unrealistic. It infuriates me when any piece of fiction is viewed as ‘lesser’ because there’s a chance it might make you smile. The books listed here will definitely make you smile. If you give them a chance, I hope you find them as worthy of your time as I did.
I could have picked anything by George Saunders, really. He’s the closest thing I have to a personal deity. Such is the level of awe and wonder that he invokes in me, I actually find him difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to look directly at the sun.
Suffice it to say that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—the title refers to a failing theme park—is like all of his other short story collections. It’s beautiful and wise and heart-breaking and deeply intelligent and, yes, desperately funny. I would pay a lot of money to be able to read it again for the first time.
Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice.
Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
I grew up in London and became interested in history from multiple visits to the British Museum and the Museum of London, but it was on an undergraduate trip to Pompeii that I realized that I was capable of explaining archaeological remains. That realization led me back to Pompeii and then Rome, but also to tracking down the archaeology of Roman roads. Writing has become important to me, perhaps, because I’m dyslexic and I’ve had some struggles to write in the past. Yet, as a dyslexic professor, working at Macquarie University (Sydney), I think I can offer students and readers explanations of history that reflect my ongoing passion for studying the past.
Pompeii is such a wonderful archaeological site and one that allows archaeologists to develop new ways to investigate how that ancient city functioned. This book, through meticulous study of paving, carts, and curbstones even, prods the surviving pieces from antiquity to create a full understanding of how traffic was enabled and hindered by the inhabitants of Pompeii. Plenty of streets blocked to traffic here and lots of detailed archaeological evidence to get to grips with, but coming through the book to the reader is the passion of the author and his need to discover and reveal new facts about Pompeii to his readers.
The Traffic Systems of Pompeii is the first sustained examination of the development of road infrastructure in Pompeii-from the archaic age to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE-and its implications for urbanism in the Roman empire. Eric E. Poehler, an authority on Pompeii's uniquely preserved urban structure, distills over five hundred instances of street-level "wear and tear" to reveal for the first time the rules of the ancient road. Through a thorough, yet lively, investigation of every facet of the infrastructure, from the city's urban grid and the shape of the streets to the treatment of their surfaces…
I am passionate about the written word and effective communication. My articles and reviews have been published in major newspapers and magazines and for two decades I taught writing on the university level. Travel writing is a subset of my experience as editor of the best-selling In Mind literary anthologies and editor and writer for more than a dozen guidebooks. In addition, I have been “first reader” and editor for prospective authors and shepherded several books to publication, the most recent Red Clay Suzie by first-time novelist Jeffrey Lofton (publication January 2023).
Eric Newby Is one of my favorite travel writers. He worked his way into situations that were bizarre, funny, and sometimes dangerous. His wife, Wanda, was often at his side, the sardonic counterpoint to his irrepressible optimism. Love and War in the Apennines is a memoir of the beginning of their love story. During World War II Newby, an escaped British prisoner of war, was kept alive in the Italian mountains by a courageous group of partisan peasants that included the heroic Wanda. Despite ever-present danger, Newby fell in love with Italy and also with the Italians who risked their lives to save his.
Hailed as Newby's 'masterpiece', Love and War in the Apennines is the gripping real-life story of Newby's imprisonment and escape from an Italian prison camp during World War II.
After the Italian Armistice of 1943, Eric Newby escaped from the prison camp in which he'd been held for a year. He evaded the German army by hiding in the caves and forests of Fontanellato, in Italy's Po Valley. Against this picturesque backdrop, he was sheltered for three months by an informal network of Italian peasants, who fed, supported and nursed him, before his eventual recapture.
Award-winning writer Laurence Klavan's newest collection of stories features twenty darkly comic and largely speculative tales.
People deal with aging parents, a world out of kilter, and their own arrested development today and in the near future, as Klavan weaves together threads of humanity and strangeness to dizzying and heartfelt…
I have written two short story collections and am working on a third. I have been passionate about short stories for as long as I have been a reader, and continue to find the form extraordinary. Alice Munro famously defined a short story as a house you can step inside rather than a journey you undertake. I feel that a short story is a respectful invitation to the reader to visit briefly and enjoy a small interlude on the way to wherever they are going.
She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.
Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You won’t believe how perfect. I love this book also because it’s so obviously “domestic fiction,” concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is…
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues…
As a kid, I was consistently described as one who had her head in the clouds. I was far away imagining all sorts of fantastical things; dragons soaring in the sky, a witch blasting a fireball in the grocery store, a werewolf coming to eat the gym teacher, the coffee barista is actually a vampire, etc. There is something alluring about supernatural beings existing in our often mundane world; whether they are being subjected to the same life we are or are wreaking havoc for any reason.
Who hasn’t imagined the books they read coming to life in their living room or being able to dive into the fictional world? A father and daughter have a magical ability to do just that.
Unfortunately, the villain of one story was released and this sets them off on an adventure typically only available in books.
Meggie and Mo are an endearing father/daughter team while they navigate the consequences and reaches of their magic.
The first book in Cornelia Funke's internationally celebrated trilogy - magical, thrilling and mesmerising.
'I don't think I've ever read anything that conveys so well the joys, terrors and pitfalls of reading' Diana Wynne Jones
Meggie loves books. So does her father, Mo, a bookbinder, although he has never read aloud to her since her mother mysteriously disappeared. They live quietly until the night a stranger knocks at their door. He has come with a warning that forces Mo to reveal an extraordinary secret - a storytelling secret that will change their lives for ever.
I’m a home cook, not a restaurant chef. I add a pinch of this and splash of that. As a chronicler of other people's culinary habits, I need to understand why we cook the way we do. At its simplest and most basic, what goes into the ancestral cooking-pot depends on who we are, where we live, and where we come from. Which is why whenever we want to remind ourselves who we are, we look for traditional recipes in culinary bibles produced at moments of change. I was born at a moment of change myself, in bombed-out London in 1941, at the height of the Blitz.
Ada Boni's culinary bible, Il talismano della felicità, first saw the light of day in 1928, six years after Benito Mussolini had succeeded in uniting Italy's quarrelsome regions under the banner of fascism.
Specifically targeted at the nation's housewives - ordinary folk on whose support El Duce rose to power in 1922 - this collection of nearly a thousand simple, practical traditional recipes for regional dishes became the dictator's favourite cookbook, as it did for generations of Italian women (still does).
I first came across it on an Italian friend's recommendation while researching European Peasant Cookery and attempting to unravel the complicated traditions of a land that remains as fiercely partisan in the kitchen now as then.
Il Talismano is and has been for over 50 years the one great standard Italian cookbook. It is to Italians what Joy of Cooking is to Americans. Containing in simple and clear form the best recipes for all the foods that we associate with Italian cuisine, it covers all the regional variations of Italian cooking: Milanese, Bolognese, Venetian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Veronese, and Florentine.
Appetizers range from the simply elegant, like Cantaloupe and Prosciutto and Artichoke Hearts in Olive Oil, to the sublime, like Tunnied Veal and Crostini of Mozzarella and Anchovies. Soups include Stracciatella, Fish Brodetto Rimini Style, and Tuscan…
These introspective tales feature animals, allegories and melodramas of everyday life. At the center of the stories are tiny creatures (a sparrow, earthworm or paperclip) struggling to make sense of larger mysterious forces. Human protagonists are equally perplexed by ordinary events – like searching for a lost key, watching late…
I grew up in New Orleans around Cajun French and Italians. My father spoke Cajun French, English, and Sicilian. I grew up thinking his Sicilian was Italian mixed with Cajun French. We considered ourselves Italian, never aware that my grandparents, paternal and maternal, emigrated from Sicily and were born just after Sicily became part of Italy (1861). Knowing nothing of Sicily, including the Sicilian spelling of my own surname and my father’s Sicilian first name, I used the computer to contact distant relatives in Sicily, discover records online, and eventually visited Sicily to find actual documents. My research led to my passion and my first book, After Laughing Comes Crying.
This is a three-volume anthology of Italian American writers recalling family dinners, holidays, funerals, weddings, Italian customs, and Italian relatives. These volumes depict Italians in their everyday life far removed from any mafioso dramas. Reading these stories helps Italians verify the meanings and pronunciations of Italian words and gestures, those things called “Italian” used long ago but since forgotten with the passing of our elders.
This collection of short stories, published by "Idea Press" is aimed at presenting the richness of styles and creativity of Italian American writers. It consists of two sections for a total of twenty-three short stories, eight of them nonfiction and fifteen of them fiction, and eighteen authors. The writers chosen by the editor to be included in this anthology are from a wide range of professional backgrounds, but ultimately most of them are published authors with an extensive experience on their curricula, as the reader may infer from their biographies.Altogether, the stories that appear in this anthology explore different topics,…
