Product Description

Passionate, exhilarating and darkly humorous, 'The Burn' is an extraordinary collection of short stories by a master of paranoia and an unsurpassed prose stylist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #481567 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
A very great writer in his own time and his own place --Literary Review

His novels and stories alike are marked by wild wit, ingenious flights of fancy and a leveller faith in the power of the common person to take charge of his or her destiny in the face of even the worst afflictions. --Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. After leaving school at 15 he worked in the printing industry and as a bus driver. In 1971 he attended creative writing night classes and in 1973 an American company published his first collection of short stories, An Old Pub Near The Angel. Greyhound for Breakfast won the 1987 Cheltenham Prize; A Disaffection won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; How late it was, how late won the 1994 Booker Prize amidst a storm of controversy. He has also written many plays for stage and radio. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and family.

Customer Reviews

Kelman At His Finest
James Kelman is now renowned as the father of the Scottish literary renaissance that has seen writers as various as Irvine Welsh, Duncan McLean and Liz Lochead emerge and acknowledge him as a clear influence. He clearly honed his craft in the medium of short stories (and his novels retain an episodic and tightly-focused character which demonstrates this), and in fact to some readers - this one included - his short stories can be superior. I would be so bold as to say that Kelman is the finest short story writer I have ever read, after James Joyce (whose style Kelman models) - better than Katherine Mansfield, for example, or Virgina Woolf, perhaps as good as Chekhov. These are exhalted names and rarified company, so what does Kelman do that is so good?

Firstly he investigates the everyday events of ordinary people with an extremely sharp eye. But more importantly, he understands that every life has the full range of emotions going on within it, so that drama, tragedy, conflict, love and loss are keenly evoked, even within so small an incident as walking to a job interview in the rain. It's not so much that he makes the mundane glamorous, as that he shows that he shows that there is nothing banal about what is sometimes dismissed as "everyday" things. It all depends upon your perception.

Secondly Kelman often but not always uses Scottish language and colloquialisms, to more fully capture his characters. His narrative style is that the narrator of the stories (when in 3rd-person) is just like one of the characters, thus preventing any hierarchies being set up. No one talks any "better" than anyone else.

The stories feature people and settings from the Scottish working class, usually in quite slight episodes. There's none of the fantasy and lurid imagination of Irvine Welsh. But from these Kelman creates highly affecting, subtle, incisive and emotionally-charged writing which will remain with you long after. (In particular, the final story "By The Burn" is enough to make you cry.) Do read this book - you will see why Kelman has been such an emormous influence and why he is referred to in such exhalted terms.