Old School — Dan O'Shea

Old School is a collection of fourteen short stories. Why Old School? Bette Davis famously noted that "Old age ain't no place for sissies." In these stories the protagonists may not all be old, but ain't none of them young anymore. They're past the solipsism of youth, that grandiose narcissism that lets the young imagine the world as a stage devoted to their glories. Every character in Old School knows that life isn't a stage, it's a ring. And you'd better learn to take a punch, because life is the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. You might land a shot here and there, but you are gonna get your ass beat and, in the end, you're going down for the count. Life is however-many-billions and 0, and each of us is just one more digit on the wrong end of that equation. PRAISE FOR OLD SCHOOL:"Sometimes O'Shea writes with this savage and wild masculine abandon - guns and broken fucking bones and toothbrushes jammed into the backs of skulls and a muscular but jaded outlook on the vagaries of mankind and the cruelty of fate. And other times, he writes with such poise, such perfect emotional rapport that you feel a horror of intimacy - he makes monstrous criminals human and understandable and the average everyday schmucks seem like demons in human skin. He can swing from erudite to profane, from the sublime to the perverted, like it ain't no thing. I've read thousands of books, no one writes like Dan O'Shea. He's a major fucking talent. The world will know." - John Hornor Jacobs, author of SOUTHERN GODS and THIS DARK EARTH"Dan O'Shea is a master of characters filled with grit and fascinating depth. Old School grabs you by the gut with the first story and roars to the end. I couldn't stop turning that pages and I'll never think of Girl Scout cookies in the same way ever again." - Joelle Charbonneau, author of SKATING AROUND THE LAW, SKATING OVER THE LINE and MURDER FOR CHOIR"Dan O'Shea's writing hits hard. The characters in OLD SCHOOL are mad, bad, and dangerous to know