If You Liked School, You'll Love Work [Paperback]

Irvine Welsh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of Trainspotting gives a master class in gallows humor in his first story collection since The Acid House (1995). Three of the five stories take place in the U.S., and Welsh relishes punishing ugly Americans. In Rattlesnakes, a trio of vapid hedonists lost in the desert are forced to perform sexually degrading acts by an unhinged illegal immigrant, while The DOGS of Lincoln Park finds a bitchy Chicago princess throwing a hissy fit over her missing papillon, Toto, who she fears has landed in her Korean neighbor's crock pot. Page-turners both, but the characters are too easily satirized. More likable is the narrator of Miss Arizona, an aspiring auteur whose interviews with his filmmaker hero's ex-wife turn increasingly creepy. Welsh shines in the title story, about an ex-pat skirt-chasing bar owner in the Canary Islands, and the novella, The Kingdom of Fife, set in a glum Scotland town. Narrative duties in the last are shared by wee Jason King, a former jockey and current compulsive masturbator and table football champion, and Jenni Cahill, a horse jumper and local gangster's daughter. That a story featuring a gruesome decapitation, dogfighting, equine death and rampant wanking can produce such an amiable effect is testament to Welsh's delightful degeneracy. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Irvine Welsh is the author of Trainspotting, Acid House, Glue, Porno, Crime, and Filth, which will start filming in January. He lives in Chicago, Miami, and London.

Product Details

• Paperback: 391 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039333077X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393330779
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #279,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Irvine Welsh is the author of Trainspotting, Ecstasy, Glue, Porno, Filth, Marabou Stork Nightmares, The Acid House, If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and Reheated Cabbage. He divides his time between Florida, Ireland, and Scotland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Jock in America, November 28, 2007

By 

Cliff Burns (Western Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If You Liked School, You'll Love Work (Paperback)

I'm a big fan of Mr. Welsh's work, it displays an exuberance and lust for language that's intoxicating. IF YOU LIKED SCHOOL...is a bit of a misfire, a collection of stories of uneven quality. The problem is, the author decided to set some of his tales in America and tried to adopt or, more rightly, imitate American speech patterns and accents. The weakest story, "Miss Arizona" is particularly guilty of this offense and the resolution to this tale is so weak, predictable and derivative,you wonder what the writer was thinking. The closing novella, "Kingdom of Fife", finds the author back on familiar ground, hobnobbing with losers and thugs and sex maniacs, the brogue so thick and heavy it's like reading CANTERBURY TALES in the original Olde English (and nearly as rewarding). "Fife" is vintage Irvine Welsh--he's not posing or pretending, he's telling it like it is, the only way he knows how.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Bad, February 6, 2008

By 

F. L. Smith (Hoboken, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If You Liked School, You'll Love Work (Paperback)

This is the first Irvine Welsh book I've struggled to finish. The stories are trite, the attempt at capturing American accents falls flat and overall the whole thing just seems...uninspired.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A slight return to form for Welsh, November 3, 2007

By 

Munko McCentral "Munko" (USA) - See all my reviews

I read Welsh's last book ('Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs') and was disappointed. With 'If you liked school...' he returns to good form a wee bit. The short stories are set in America and I can take or leave them, although they have their moments. As a Scot living in America, the dialect/accent that he gives the American characters made me squirm at times. The stories aren't his best writing, but there's some twists. The book is worth buying for the novella, set in Cowdenbeath. A breath of fresh air, moving away from his usual settings of Leith and Edinburgh. Interesting characters and a good bit of dialect and humour.