The Books canon

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Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
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2 volumes
SortEditorial Year Title
Subject·Workers✕clear
Nonfiction

Workers

An Archaeology of the Industrial Age
Sebastiao Salgado
1993 · 400 pages

Fifty thousand men climb out of a Brazilian gold pit on wooden ladders, caked in mud. Salgado spent six years across twenty-six countries photographing manual labor as the machines took it away.

★ 4.9
Fiction · Modernism

The Foundation Pit

Andrei Platonov
1930 · 224 pages

Workers dig a foundation for the building that will house the whole proletariat, and the pit keeps widening. Platonov's Russian buckles under its own slogans, and the Soviets suppressed the book until 1987.

★ 6.6