"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."
-Dustin M. Hoffman (he/him)
