La vita agra, known in English-speaking countries as It's a Hard Life, is a novel by Luciano Bianciardi published in 1962 by Rizzoli.

An intellectual moves from a small Tuscan town to the industrial hub of Milan with the secret intention of carrying out an act of rebellion: bombing the headquarters of a mining company responsible for a tragic workplace explosion in his hometown.

His lofty revolutionary goals gradually give way to existential disillusionment as he takes on various writing and translating jobs in an alienating and oppressive corporate culture.

Italo Calvino wrote a review in which he regarded the novel positively and compared it to other works of the so-called letteratura industriale (Industrial literature), a current which spread at the beginning of the Italian economic miracle, such as Paolo Volponi's Memoriale and Giovanni Arpino's Una nuvola d'ira.

He praised the all-encompassing language that succeeds masterfully in expressing and representing the industrial reality in a more complex way, even if he saw some weaknesses connected to the book's uncontainable autobiography that is limited, in his opinion, to a "private anarchist protest".