Most Popular Books by James Kelman

A collection of short stories by the Booker Prize-winning Scottish master Giving voice to the dispossessed and crafting stories of lives held in the balance, James Kelman reaches us all. Penetrating deeply into the hearts, minds, and desperation of characters who find themselves in everyday situations—in the hospital, at a bus stop, in a living room with the endless roar of the vacuum cleaner and a distant wife—Kelman follows their streams of consciousness and brings their worries to life. With honesty and dark humor, he confronts the issues of language, class, politics, gender, and age—identity in all its forms.

In Scotland, the portrait of a petty crook who had one run-in with police too many. It is a series of reflections as he sits in jail, contemplating his fate. He had been in trouble before, but this time it's different, the latest brawl with police cost him his eyesight. Now in addition to all his other troubles he is blind.

Jeremiah Brown is a man of extremes. So when he nips out for a quick drink on the eve of returning to his native Scotland after twelve years in America, anything could happen. Anything at all. Just one quick drink to help him sleep but there's something about this town and this bar that reminds him of his ex. Soon the memories are flooding in and as the night goes on and the decision to stop smoking looks increasingly ill-timed for a card-carrying alien of questionable politics, Jeremiah getting on that flight tomorrow starts to seem far from certain. Is there any such thing as a certainty? Not tonight. Tonight the only thing certain is that you have to be very careful in the land of the free.

James Kelman, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of How Late It Was, How Late, tells the story of Helen—a sister, a mother, a daughter—a very ordinary young woman. Her boyfriend said she was quirky but she is much more than that. Trust, love, relationships; parents, children, lovers; death, wealth, home: these are the ordinary parts of the everyday that become extraordinary when you think of them as Helen does, each waking hour. Mo Said She Was Quirky begins on Helen’s way home from work, with the strangest of moments when a skinny, down-at-heel man crosses the road in front of her and appears to be her lost brother. What follows is an inspired and absorbing story of twenty-four hours in the life of a young woman.

Stories about the Scottish working class. In Pulped Sandwiches, construction workers discuss death, Oh My Darling is on a husband who indulges in pawing his wife in public, while in I Was Asking a Question Too, a man plasters the walls of his apartment with wise sayings from books.

James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create. People should know that their stories count, no matter how personal, how emotional, how eccentric, how trivial, how stupid or how self-centred they may appear. Just make them, and make them your own, in spite of hostility, of negativity, of the threat of punishment: go to it. Language is with the user and you are the user. Make these stories and make them your own.

Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated, and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. This is an apparently straightforward story of one week in a man's life in which he decides to change the way he lives. Under the surface, however, lies a brilliant and complex examination of class, human culture, and character written with irony, tenderness, enormous anger, and, above all, the honesty that has marked James Kelman as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain.

A groundbreaking, verbally dazzling work of compelling importance from a modern master. Since the publication in 1994 of the Booker Prize-winning," How late it was, how late, James Kelman has been working on Translated Accounts. The new novel is set in an unnamed territory or country that appears to be under military rule. It is narrated in the first person, but the narrator remains anonymous, as do most of the other characters. The language used is an atypical English form, but akin to the basic translation that might appear within a department of an overseas 'foreign office.' Perhaps someone transcribed first-hand accounts of certain incidents, events and states of mind, as narrated by participants in the struggle and then passed on the transcriptions for translation; or perhaps the accounts were simply translated first-hand into English and edited later. In either case the results were dispatched to a more senior civil servant who later handed them over to an appropriate state agency.

Rejected by his brother and largely ignored by his parents, Kieron Smith finds comfort - and endless stories - in the home of his much-loved grandparents. But when his family move to a new housing scheme on the outskirts of the city, a world away from the close community of the tenements, Kieron struggles to find a way to adapt to his new life. Warm, funny, with searing insight and astonishing empathy, in Kieron Smith, James Kelman has created an unforgettable boy.

“The world is full of information. What do we do when we get the information, when we have digested the information, what do we do then? Is there a point where ye say, yes, stop, now I shall move on.” James Kelman here offers something of why a book such of this is in front of the public. The State relies on our suffocation, that we cannot hope to learn “the truth.” But whether we can or not is beside “the point.” Finally, there is no “point.” We must grasp the nettle, we assume control and go forward. Kelman says, “I wanted to convey some of that sensibility with the idea of being in conversation with Noam Chomsky, of being in his presence, a sort of seminar. It is not influence. I don’t see it as ‘being influenced’ by Chomsky. He belongs to the great tradition of teaching, of learning. We learn from him through what he does.” At its core, this exhilarating collection of essays, interviews, and correspondence—spanning the years 1988 through 2018, and reaching back a decade or more previous—is about the simple concept that ideas matter. And not only that ideas matter. But that ideas—in this case, through the lens of two engaged intellectuals—mutate, inform, inspire, and ultimately provide more fuel for thought, the actions that follow such thought, and for carrying on, and doing the work.

James Kelman's inimitable voice brings the stories of lost men to light in these twenty-one tales of down on their luck antiheroes who wander, drink, hatch plans, ponder existence, and survive in an unwelcoming and often comic world. Keep Moving and No Questions is a collection of the finest examples of Kelman's facility with dialog, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and sharp cultural observation. Class is always central in these brief glimpses of men abiding the hands they've been dealt. An ideal introduction to Kelman's work and a wonderful edition for fans and Kelman completists, this lovely volume will make clear why James Kelman is known as the greatest living modernist writer. Five of the stories collected here are brand new, and the rest have been significantly revised by the author for this definitive edition.

These 35 short stories--most published in this country for the first time--bring to mind, "at various moments, such diverse masterpieces . . . as James Joyce's "Dubliners" . . . and the parables of Kafka" ("The Village Voice").

Living in a no-bedroomed tenement flat, coping with the cold and boredom of busconducting and the bloody-mindedness of Head Office, knowing that emigrating to Australia is only an impossible dream, Robert Hines finds life to be ¿a very perplexing kettle of coconuts¿. The compensations are a wife and child, and a gloriously anarchic imagination. The Busconductor Hines is a brilliantly executed, uncompromising slice of the Glasgow scene, a portrait of working-class life which is unheroic but humane.

Booker Prize winner James Kelman's new novel, Dirt Road, tells the story of a teenage boy who travels with his father from Scotland to Alabama to visit with relatives after the death of his mother. In the American South, he becomes swept up into the world of zydeco and blues. ""A powerful meditation on loss, life, death, and the bond between father and son. . . . Kelman has created a fully–realized, relatable voice that reveals a young man’s urgent need for connection in a time of grief." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) After his mother’s recent death, sixteen–year–old Murdo and his father travel from their home in rural Scotland to Alabama to be with his émigré uncle and American aunt. Stopping at a small town on their way from the airport, Murdo happens upon a family playing zydeco music and joins them, leaving with a gift of two CDs of Southern American songs. On this first visit to the States, Murdo notices racial tension, religious fundamentalism, the threat of severe weather, guns, and aggressive behavior, all unfamiliar to him. Yet his connection to the place strengthens by way of its musical culture. Murdo may be young but he is already a musician. While at their relatives’ home, the grieving father and son experience kindness and kinship but share few words of comfort with each other, Murdo losing himself in music and his reticent and protective dad in books. The aunt, “the very very best,” Murdo calls her, provides whatever solace he receives, until his father comes around in a scene of great emotional release. As James Wood has written of this brilliant writer’s previous work in The New Yorker, “The pleasure, as always in Kelman, is being allowed to inhabit mental meandering and half–finished thoughts, digressions and wayward jokes, so that we are present” with his characters. Dirt Road is a powerful story about the strength of family ties, the consolation of music, and one unforgettable journey from darkness to light.

"Thought-provoking" short stories from the Man Booker Prize–winning author of How Late It Was, How Late and Kieron Smith, Boy ( Scotsman). A trucker passes through a town he used to know and a local tries to sell him his sister; a couple put their children to bed and hear a loud scratching at the wall; a Principal and his associate examine the dead body before them; a man looks into a mirror and reflects on becoming more like his father. Sparky, touching, and brilliantly daring, these stories uncover human feeling in the ordinary and the everyday, and are a reminder of Kelman's exceptional talent. Shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year · Longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. "Kelman brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can." —Alan Warner, award-winning author of The Man Who Walks "The mixture of the precisely but surreally bureaucratic and the casually macabre is perfectly judged." — The Times "Kelman is on another level to most of the living writers in the UK." — The Guardian "Kelman has always been a true and honest writer; which is why he is one of the fairly few who really matter." — Scotsman "Kelman's language is immediately exciting; like a musician, he uses repetition and rhythm." — The New Yorker

Novelist, playwright, essayist, and master of the short story. Artist and engaged working-class intellectual; husband, father, and grandfather as well as committed revolutionary activist. From his first publication (a short story collection An Old Pub Near the Angel on a tiny American press) through his latest novel (God's Teeth and other Phenomena) and work with Noam Chomsky (Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime—both published on a slightly larger American press), All We Have Is the Story chronicles the life and work—to date—of “Probably the most influential novelist of the post-war period.” (The Times) Drawing deeply on a radical tradition that is simultaneously political, philosophical, cultural, and literary, James Kelman articulates the complexities and tensions of the craft of writing; the narrative voice and grammar; imperialism and language; art and value; solidarity and empathy; class and nation state; and. above all, that it begins and ends with the story. “One of the things the establishment always does is isolate voices of dissent and make them specific—unique if possible. It's easy to dispense with dissent if you can say there's him in prose and him in poetry. As soon as you say there's him, him, and her there, and that guy here and that woman over there, and there's all these other writers in Africa, and then you've got Ireland, the Caribean—suddenly there's this kind of mass dissent going on, and that becomes something dangerous, something that the establishment won't want people to relate to and go Christ, you're doing the same as me. Suddenly there's a movement going on. It's fine when it's all these disparate voices; you can contain that. The first thing to do with dissent is say ‘You're on your own, you're a phenomenon.’ I'm not a phenomenon at all: I'm just a part of what's been happening in prose for a long, long while.” —James Kelman from a 1993 interview

This is a big bundle of essays and written talks, put down over a long number of years: Kelman hopes some of them make you smile. James Kelman began as a writer of fiction and became a writer of nonfiction in the bargain. He had a short story set for his first ever publication that the printer refused to print on the grounds of "blasphemy." He searched the story for this "blasphemy" but couldn't find any. He solved the problem by submitting a different story. In the years to follow the hostility didn't vanish. He began to challenge, saying what he thought and why he thought it. Defending is a drain on one's energy. But when attacked directly it is hard to walk on. This collection of twenty-four essays—personal, political, and in between—tells the intertwined tales of art, literature, history, culture, and life. They look and question not through an academic lens of literary theory and the great traditions but through lived experience and resistance to the status quo. From class, ethnicity, and other borders to one's ability as a writer to earn a living, or not, in order to survive in the drudgery of capitalism. And therefore, whose stories do we experience? Can we see ourselves in them? What is lost or hidden? Amidst these questions are glimpses into the life of an artist and the connections made. Weaving stories of childhood, the importance of bookshops, to the people met along the way that make a world whole.

Incendiary and heartrending, the sixteen essays in The State Is the Enemy lay bare government brutality against the working class, immigrants, asylum-seekers, ethnic minorities, and all who are deemed of “a lower order.” Drawing parallels between atrocities committed against the Kurds by the Turkish State, and the racist police brutality, and government sanctioned murders in the UK, James Kelman shatters the myth of Western exceptionalism,revealing the universality of terror campaigns levied against the most vulnerable, and calling on a global citizenship to stand in solidarity with victims of oppression. Kelman’s case against the Turkish and British governments is not just a litany of murders, or an impassioned plea—it is a cool-headed take down of the State and an essential primer for revolutionaries.

Jack Proctor, a celebrated older writer and curmudgeon, goes off to residency where he is to be an honored part of teaching and giving public readings, he soon finds the atmosphere of the literary world has changed since his last foray into the public sphere. Unknown to most, unable to work on his own writing, surrounded by a host of odd characters, would-be writers, antagonists, handlers, and members of the elite House of Art and Aesthetics, Proctor finds himself driven to distraction (literally in a very very tiny car). This is a story of a man attempting not to go mad when forced to stop his own writing in order to coach others to write. Proctor’s tour of rural places, pubs, theaters, fancy parties, where he is to be headlining as a "Banker-Prize-Winning-Author" reads like a literary version of Spinal Tap. Uproariously funny, brilliantly philosophical, gorgeously written this is James Kelman at his best.