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Selected Stories
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.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
144 pages, Paperback
First published June 23, 2001
23 people want to read
About the author
James Kelman
80 books270 followersKelman says:
My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city. Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc. etc. (...) For one reason or another, by the age of 21/22 I decided to write stories. The stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people, I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community.
During the 1970s he published a first collection of short stories. He became involved in Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing group in Glasgow along with Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead, and his short stories began to appear in magazines. These stories introduced a distinctive style, expressing first person internal monologues in a pared-down prose utilising Glaswegian speech patterns, though avoiding for the most part the quasi-phonetic rendition of Tom Leonard. Kelman's developing style has been influential on the succeeding generation of Scottish novelists, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Janice Galloway. In 1998, Kelman received the Stakis Prize for "Scottish Writer of the Year" for his collection of short stories 'The Good Times.'
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/au...
My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city. Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc. etc. (...) For one reason or another, by the age of 21/22 I decided to write stories. The stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people, I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community.
During the 1970s he published a first collection of short stories. He became involved in Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing group in Glasgow along with Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead, and his short stories began to appear in magazines. These stories introduced a distinctive style, expressing first person internal monologues in a pared-down prose utilising Glaswegian speech patterns, though avoiding for the most part the quasi-phonetic rendition of Tom Leonard. Kelman's developing style has been influential on the succeeding generation of Scottish novelists, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Janice Galloway. In 1998, Kelman received the Stakis Prize for "Scottish Writer of the Year" for his collection of short stories 'The Good Times.'
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/au...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 3, 2024
Feel mean but marking on enjoyment ,just not my thing, felt disappointed at all endings... but he can surely write,perfect capture of thoughts and every day tiny happenings and how they make a person feel....
April 26, 2025
I quite liked these ("Pictures" was the best), though his novels are better. Very Chekhov, i.e. not a lot happens and if it does it's usually an anticlimax, most of the drama is contained in the male, working-class Scottish protagonists' thoughts.
December 12, 2025
Mostly ok, but ‘Pictures’ and ‘In with the doctor’ were really great
Definitely feels honest but at times a bit too vague for me to find its substance (probably my fault, not Kelman’s tho)
Definitely feels honest but at times a bit too vague for me to find its substance (probably my fault, not Kelman’s tho)
November 18, 2007
This is a typical Kelman sentence:
It jist comes oot, ah says, it's the natchril rithm o the workin klass, ah jist opens ma mooth and oot it comes.
If that hasn't put you off, read on.
I have to say I enjoyed this book more than I expected. Kelman is a working-class writer. He sticks to what he knows, at least to the world he knows, because, as the last story in the collection demonstrates with its references to Kafka and Chekov, he knows more than one might expect. His language is coarse, difficult to read at first. He spells things phonetically, all but abandons apostrophes in contractions and possessive forms and thinks nothing of ending a paragraph in the middle of a sentence only to begin the next paragraph where he left off. These are obstacles rather than simply negatives. Burgess's A Clockwork Orange poses similar problems.
On the positive side, you'd think he'd sat in the corner whiles the events in his tales unwound with a tape recorder. His writing in like a transcription of the day-to-day banter I've heard all my life. But he goes one step further, especially in the story 'Pictures' where he describes the thoughts of a young man during a matinée performance at his local cinema, he gets inside their heads. Although some of the scenarios are universal, a drunk trying to talk to a young girl in a bar, a man being accosted by three layabouts, the mentality is quintessentially Glaswegian.
It jist comes oot, ah says, it's the natchril rithm o the workin klass, ah jist opens ma mooth and oot it comes.
If that hasn't put you off, read on.
I have to say I enjoyed this book more than I expected. Kelman is a working-class writer. He sticks to what he knows, at least to the world he knows, because, as the last story in the collection demonstrates with its references to Kafka and Chekov, he knows more than one might expect. His language is coarse, difficult to read at first. He spells things phonetically, all but abandons apostrophes in contractions and possessive forms and thinks nothing of ending a paragraph in the middle of a sentence only to begin the next paragraph where he left off. These are obstacles rather than simply negatives. Burgess's A Clockwork Orange poses similar problems.
On the positive side, you'd think he'd sat in the corner whiles the events in his tales unwound with a tape recorder. His writing in like a transcription of the day-to-day banter I've heard all my life. But he goes one step further, especially in the story 'Pictures' where he describes the thoughts of a young man during a matinée performance at his local cinema, he gets inside their heads. Although some of the scenarios are universal, a drunk trying to talk to a young girl in a bar, a man being accosted by three layabouts, the mentality is quintessentially Glaswegian.
January 18, 2010
This is a wonderful pocket-sized collection of Kelman's stories from Canongate. I've read some of them already but they are always a joy to read. At £1.99 these Canongate books are the bargain of a lifetime. (Others in the series include Burns, Scott, Hogg, Stevenson, Muriel Spark, and Alasdair Gray's 'A Short History of Classic Scottish Writing')
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews