Sammy's had a bad week - his wallet's gone, along with his new shoes, he's been arrested then beaten up by the police and thrown out on the street - and he's just gone blind. He remembers a row with his girlfriend, but she seems to have disappeared. Things aren't looking too good for Sammy and his problems have hardly begun

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.This collection of nearly a hundred pieces of very short fiction spans five decades and reveals James Kelman’s mastery of the form. As ever, Kelman insists on his characters telling their stories in their own voices, whether in working-class Glaswegian diale...

Patrick Doyle is a twenty-nine-year-old teacher in an ordinary comprehensive school. Isolated, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, he begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher.

"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.

Incendiary and heartrending, the sixteen essays in The State is Your 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 le...

An award-winning novel of urban boyhood: "No other . . . comes as close as this to Catcher in the Rye." — The Literary ReviewA Man Booker Prize–winning author brings us inside the head of a young boy in a novel that offers a "splendid evocation of childhood in mid-20th-century Glasgow" ( The Washington Post).Here is the story of a boyhood in a large industrial city during a time of great social change. Kieron grows from age five t...

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 o...

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 conscious narrative, and sharp cultural observation. Class is always central in these brief glimpses of men abiding the hands they've been dealt. An...

All We Have is the Story collects fifty years of interviews, both published and unpublished, revealing James Kelman's thinking on a breadth of topics from writing and literature to class and race to sports and philosophy.

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...

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 writ ing, 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 (l...

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 w...