What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it - calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation.

What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation.

In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz describes with clarity and precision what class is, its various and often nuanced manifestations, and the violence it inflicts upon the working-class while, simultaneously articulating an alternative to assimilation, which can only mean annihilation.

Utilizing Freud's concept of melancholia as a starting point, Cruz examines working-class writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians, looking at the melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves her working-class origins to "become someone," only to find that she loses herself in the process.

"This is a vital book, deeply personal and charged with the kind of wisdom and solidarity that only belongs to those who understand what it feels like to be overlooked and left behind." - Jim Gavin, creator of Lodge 49

"An unprecedented reckoning with class and poverty as it relates to creative life in the modern age. Cruz forges a merciful new footing to state what's long overdue: that many of us have been dying while we write, and that the sorrow of surviving poverty, if at all, is a grief finally named in this courageous and deeply true work." - Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous