"Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart ... examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through ... firsthand storytelling, Quart [posits that]...

Flaubert's classic tale, in which the title character turns to spending and a series of affairs to combat the boredom of married life and, heartbroken and crippled by debts, takes drastic action that results in tragedy.

She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can't get the girl out of her head... Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and...

Taking readers into the homes of middle-class families to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life, the author describes the moral conflicts for parents who take on enormous debt and gamble on an investment that might not pay off.

"Political journalist Michael Tomasky tracks an exciting change among progressive economists who are overturning decades of conservative dogma and offering an alternative version of capitalism that can serve broadly shared prosperity to all"--

Follows Stella, a lower-middle-class British girl born in the 1950s, whose coming-of-age experiences mirror the broader cultural development of her times.

"Senator Elizabeth Warren has long been an outspoken champion of America's middle class, and by the time the people of Massachusetts elected her in 2012, she had become one of the country's leading progressive voices. Now, at a perilous moment for our nation, she has written a book that is at once an illuminating account of how we built the strongest middle class in history, a scathing indictment of those who have spent the past thirty-five years...

In this British comedy classic, Mr. Charles Pooter, a middle-class, middle-aged city clerk in Victorian England, chronicles his daily domestic and social frustrations in hilarious detail.