New Releases by James Kelman

James Kelman has long been regarded as one of the finest writers of fiction in the world. In this brilliant collection of essays he deals with matters literary, artistic, political and philosophical. In the essay ''"And the Judges Said..."'' Kelman outlines some of the influences that led him to create literary art, from the music he heard as a teenager to American and Russian writers, to the lives of the Impressionists. Elsewhere he looks at the role of elitism in literature, the central importance of Chomsky''s work in 20th century thought and the work of the Caribbean Artists Movement. There are essays on the struggle to save the steel industry in Scotland and on the situation of the Kurds in Turkey; at the core of the collection is an extended essay on Franz Kafka.

Covering a fifteen year period and focusing on the East Wirralarea of Merseyside where esteemed photographer Ken Grant was brought up and still lives, this first book is rooted in autobiography. A region without hold on either manufacturing or industry, its people have for centuries taken casual work as and when it was available, with few guarantees for their future. Responding to the disaffection of this community, to the uneasy sense of dislocation and loss, these photographs capture the essence of lives that are improvised and uncertain. With 60 duotone photos.

Offers some of the author's best work from three separate collections. The Bevel and The Hitchhiker tell of Chas, Sammy and the boy working in the Highlands in the summer, while Pictures and Lassies Are Trained That Way have their own take on the relationships between men and women.

Robert Hines est un jeune employé de bus de Glasgow, il rêve de devenir conducteur mais aux yeux des inspecteurs de la compagnie, il est trop original, il a trop de mal à se plier aux règles, aux horaires. Confronté à un quotidien " désastreux et étrangement banal ", il n'y survit que grâce à son amour pour sa femme et son fils et une imagination magnifiquement anarchique. Dans ce roman drôle, intelligent et réellement original, James Kelman met en scène avec une verve et un humour sans complaisance le dur milieu ouvrier de Glasgow : la religion, le foot, l'alcool, les copains, la pesanteur aliénante des réunions enfumées... Il décrit une vie de travailleur, sans héroïsme, simplement humaine, en créant un personnage attachant et inoubliable.

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").

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.

Winner of the Booker Prize. "A work of marvelous vibrance and richness of character." "New York Times" Book Review

James Kelman - like Kafka or Beckett - is unique to his age: for his refusal to mince words, his ability to present real life without the condescension of `social realism'' and his absolute belief that the language, not literature, makes the culture. Kelman''s landscapes are the wastelands of the inner cities, the tenement blocks, bedsits and doss-houses of Glasgow, Manchester and London, where booze, cards and, sometimes, crime provide the only escape from a no-hope future. This collection of forty-seven stories reflects the huge scope of Kelman''s writing, from 1972 to now: ranging in length from one paragraph to twenty pages, from the concrete to the lyrical, from casual tragedy to wild farce. His only consistencies are his originality and excellence, his ability to give voice to the inarticulate, and his way of creating, out of low life, high art.

Na zijn vrijlating uit de gevangenis wordt een Engelsman blind als gevolg van een incident met de politie, wat echter moeilijk te bewijzen is.

"The characters in THE BURN are tense, wound up, tight as a drum. Relationships are collapsing, communications are breaking down and events are spinning out of control. Passionate, exhilarating and darkly funny, THE BURN is an extraordinary book by a master of paranoia and a prose of genius."

In this collection of essays, polemics and talks, Kelman directs his linguistic craftsmanship and scathing humor at targets ranging from private profit and public loss to the endemic racism, class bias and general elitism at the English end of the Anglo-American literary tradition.

This is James Kelman''s first collection of short stories - as fresh and sharp as when they first appeared from US publisher "Puckerbrush Press". Set among the tenements and bedsits of Glasgow, they shine a light on the exploits of young and old. James Kelman had been writing since about 1967 and by 1971 had enough stories for a book. In 1973, "An Old Pub Near The Angel" was published and the rest is history. The US edition has never been out of print. -- Amazon.com.

Un desafecto plasma el mundo de Patrick Doyle, un profesor de secundaria de Glasgow próximo a la treintena, en cuadros que describen una semana de su vida en crisis. Pero la crisis de Patrick no es sólo la crisis de los treinta.

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.

"NOT NOT WHILE THE GIRO is James Kelman''s first major collection of short storeis, and takes the reader from the pub to the Labour Exchange, from the snooker tables to the greyhound track. Written with irony, tenderness and enormous anger, the book confirms James Kelman''s stature as one of the most important writers of and in contemporary Britain."

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