Busted Scotch: Selected Stories

A literary event: the selected stories of the acclaimed author of the Booker Prize-winning How late it was, how late, most of them being published in this country for the first time. This collection of 35 short stories has been selected and arranged by James Kelman himself from over two decades of his work. It reveals the author as a tough-minded master of the short form, which he infuses with his unique brand of bleak comedy and his absolute belief that language, not literature, makes the culture. The stories in Busted Scotch are set in the working-class milieu of Scotland and Englandthe pubs, betting shops, tenements, bedrooms, snooker parlors, and decaying industrial workplaces. They range widely in length from a few paragraphs to twenty-plus pages, in style from the deceptively casual to the highly farcical, and in subject matter from casual everyday tragedies to the heartbreaking vicissitudes of romance and language. Each of these stories manages the near-miracle of giving eloquent voice to the previously inarticulate. Some of them will strike readers as masterpiecesall of them created out of low life, high art.

The stories in James Kelman's collection, Busted Scotch are as bleak as a Scottish winter. Kelman's characters are working class people--mostly men, mostly inarticulate--whose dead-end existences are relentlessly dark. Fortunately, the reader, if not the characters, is rescued from this lunarscape vision by bracing doses of Kelman's black humor and impressive prose. Sometimes, as in "Nice to be Nice," the prose is rendered in a thick Scots dialect that might confound readers outside of the U.K. Most stories, however, are more accessible linguistically, though liberally laced with obscenities. Kelman does not concentrate his energies on character development or even on action; nothing much happens in many of these stories, yet everything changes. In "Pictures," a man notices a woman in a movie theater, buys her coffee, begins to wonder if she's a prostitute. These tiny, uneventful occurrences lead to the revelation of an unresolved trauma in the man's own life. In "A Nightboilerman's Notes," the narrator achieves a strange kind of transcendence simply contemplating the darkness in the bowels of a factory.

Kelman, who won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel How Late It Was, How Late, has selected the 35 stories in Busted Scotch from more than 20 years' work. Many of these stories make their American debut in this collection.