In “Madame Bovary”, Charles, an awkward country doctor courts and weds Emma, the beautiful young daughter of a patient. Emma, unsuited to the role of housewife, quickly gets restless and begins to explore her passions. This leads to infidelities which she hides from Charles and, eventually, mounting debts as she turns to merchandise for her happiness. Flaubert’s novel is cited as the first example of literary realism and has been called a “perfect”...

The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

Marco Rubio's parents came to the United States in 1956. The country they found was truly a land of opportunity, where hardworking people with grade school educations could afford a home, a car, and college for their kids. A country where maids and bartenders could raise doctors, lawyers, small-business owners, and maybe even a U.S. senator. That was the American Dream-our country's central promise to its people, if you work hard and play by the rules,...

"At the age of seventeen, Etta Messenger stepped from a school bus in a seemingly safe Chicago suburb and never reached her front door. Six years later, it's clear that none of the members of her middle-class family have finished mourning. Gaping emotional wounds have been poorly addressed. Etta's mother, Meg, anxious to find closure and make what she can of the rest of her life, has organized a memorial service to mark the painful anniversary. Newton,...

One of TIME’s Best New Books to Read This Summer

“Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.” 
   — Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

Families today are

...

After moving with her husband and children to the well-manicured community of Stepford, Connecticut, former New York television executive Joanna Eberhart is beginning to realize that Stepford is more than just the "perfect" place to live ... it's a little to perfect. All the wives in town are models who cater to their husband's every desire. What is going on behind the closed doors of the Stepford Men's Association and the Stepford Day Spa? Can Joanna...

Documentary traces the worldwide economic collapse to a 1971 secret memo entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System. Written over 40 years ago by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce, the 6-page memo, a free-market utopian treatise, called for a money fueled big business makeover of government through corporate control of media, academia, pulpit, arts and sciences and destruction of organized...

"America is becoming a class-based society. It is now conventional wisdom to focus on the wealth of the top 1 percent-especially the top 0.01 percent-and how the ultra-rich are concentrating income and prosperity while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the most important, consequential, and widening gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else. Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes...

"In a searing indictment of America's decline, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert profiles struggling Americans--casualties of decades of government policies that have produced underemployment, inequality, and pointless wars--and offers a ringing call to arms to restore justice and the American dream. The United States needs to be reimagined. Once described by Lincoln as the last best hope on earth, the country seemed on the verge of fulfilling...

Based on the Nobel Prize-winning novels by John Galsworthy, The saga is an epic and highly praised series spanning three generations of the powerful Forsyte family at the turn of the 20th century. Beneath the family's imposing veneer lies a festering core of unhappy and brutal relationships.