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If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is up to his old tricks with his new work of transgressive short fiction.

Irvine Welsh's first short-story collection since his debut work The Acid House presents five extraordinary stories, which remind us that he is a master of the short form, a brilliant storyteller, and — unarguably — one of today's funniest and most subversive writers. In "Rattlesnakes" three young Americans, lost in the desert, are accosted by two armed Mexicans. A Korean chef and a Chicago socialite find themselves connected through the disappearance of a pooch named Toto in "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park." And in the title story, Mickey Baker — an ex-pat English bar owner living on the Costa Brava — tries to keep all of his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid's weight at the sexual maximum, attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his ex-wife and Spanish gangsters.

In typically Welshian fashion, the characters and settings are anything but typical. These stories will make you laugh and gasp.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 391
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780393330779
  • Genres
  • fiction, contemporary, humor, scotland, literature, drama, comedy, modern
  • Release date
  • 2007