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Selected Stories (Kelman)

by James Kelman

ISBN: 9781841951591
Imprint: Canongate Classics
Publication Date: Jun 2008
Format: Paperback
Price: £1.99 £7.49
Stock Status: in stock

James Kelman’s oblique, wry and open-ended short stories reveal him to be a master of the form and this selection offers some of his best work from three separate collections. ’The Bevel’ and ’The Hitch-hiker’ tell of Chas, Sammy and "the boy" working in the Highlands in the summer, while ’Picture’ and ’Lassies are trained that way’ have their own take on the relationship between men and women. ’Old Francis' evokes a moment of existential terror in an urban park while ’In with the Doctor’ takes a humorously Kafkaesque look at the medical profession and the class expectations that surround it.

James Kelman was born in Govan in 1946. His mother was a housewife, his father in the picture frame-making and gilding trade. He left school at fifteen, and in his early twenties decided to concentrate on writing fiction. He has said that his strong ambition was to ‘write and remain a member of [his] own community’, and his experiences of inner-city life, as well as the Scots dialect, shape his writing. Kelman’s stream-of-consciousness novel, How Late it was, How Late, is written in working-class Scots, and controversially won him the Booker Prize in 1994. As well as novels and short stories, Kelman has also published many plays for both radio and theatre, as well as a television screenplay and a collection of essays. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and children, though he has also lived in London, Manchester, the Channel Islands, Australia and America.

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