A “bracing, hilarious and dead on” account of a college graduate’s chronic underemployment (The New York Times Book Review).
In ten years, Iain Levison has lived in six states and worked at forty-two jobs, from fish cutter in Alaska to furniture mover in North Carolina, film-set gopher, oil deliveryman, truck driver, and crab fisherman. He quit thirty of them, got fired from nine, and has difficulty remembering the other three. Whatever could go wrong often did, hilariously.
A Working Stiff’s Manifesto is a funny book about the not-so-funny experience of dead-end jobs—the real thing, written not by a high-priced journalist disguised as a counter clerk, but by a genuine wage-dependent, hand-to-mouth working stiff, too well-off for welfare yet too broke to fit a consumer demographic. He works to keep his car running to get back and forth from work. He works to get by and get back to square one for the next day’s labors. And in this book, he finally gets some use out of the forty thousand he blew on his English degree—providing an “entertaining, unusual mix of autobiography and social commentary [from] a sharp-eyed, impassioned critic of the American workplace” (Publishers Weekly).
