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.


From Library Journal
The Scotsmen in these stories and fragments (some no more than a paragraph or two) by Booker Prize winner Kelman live in squats, caravans, and tenements, on the dole and on the edge. They would be working-class if they worked, but they're layabouts and idlers who prefer to sponge off their mates and neighbors. The narrator of "Not While the Giro" considers himself a late starter, but, by most standards, he's a nonstarter. He worries that he's losing his mind, but his very self-awareness convinces himself otherwise as he muses, "Often I sit by my window in order to sort myself out--a group therapy within." In "A Situation," a boarding house tenant is asked down to the room of an elderly invalid who confesses to an old crime of industrial sabotage while the younger man is haunted by his own secret, an infidelity with his girlfriend's sister. The reader may not wish to know these characters well but will be grateful for the opportunity of this brief meeting. Recommended for literary collections.?Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., OntarioCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Richard Burgin, New York Times Book Review
Busted Scotch is filled with strong stories and the best of them are fiercely beautiful. . . . [A] brilliant fictive universe.


The New York Times Book Review, Richard Burgin
Most of the protagonists in Busted Scotch, Mr. Kelman's selections from two decades' worth of his stories ... walk about the streets in the seedier cities of Scotland and England, acutely sensing their pain and their thwarted needs. For these men the past is full of anguish, or at best regret.... Like the narrator of Beckett's novel The Unnameable, they often argue with themselves: "I can't go on. I'll go on."


Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
There is the authenticity of the lives that emerge from these pages. No other writer gives or has given the working class its own say on its own terms with such creative empathy as Kelman.


From Booklist
When Kelman won England's prestigious Booker Prize for his novel How Late It Was, How Late (1994), complaints of lost standards, boorish savagery, etc., were heard. While that carping betrayed continuing class prejudice in British literary circles, for Kelman's fiction is resolutely about working-class Scots, it was accurate in that Kelman's protagonists are usually demoralized, often drunk and violent. Furthermore, at novel length, Kelman can be darned demanding; indeed, most are daunted by his short stories when he writes in Glaswegian (the patois of the Scottish industrial city Glasgow: "Strange thing wis it stertit oan a Wedinsday," one story begins) or opens in medias res (e.g., in "Not Not While the Giro," "Of tea so I can really enjoy this . . ."), leaving the reader to figure out where things really began. But make the effort, for Kelman's monologues, sketches, anecdotes, and more traditional stories are a prose poetry of unparalleled vividness and pungency. This new book is Kelman's own selection of the best of them. Ray Olson


From Kirkus Reviews
Capitalizing on his 1995 Booker novel, How late it was, how late, Kelman offers this compendium of 35 stories--10 culled from his only other collection to have appeared here (Greyhound for Breakfast, 1988)--portraying the down-and-out of Scottish society. The focus of these pieces (some of them a few paragraphs long), rendered in the frank, ferocious style for which Kelman has been rightly acclaimed, never shifts far from the working poor or the unemployed in Glasgow. Young or old, male or female, all of Kelman's characters are scarred both by poverty and by the inner frailties that poverty and violence give rise to. These wounds are often only incompletely perceived by the protagonists. ``No Long the Warehouseman'' describes a man who has ended up on the dole for reasons he can't explain to himself, let alone to his wife. In ``By the Burn,'' a father finds that memories of his daughter's violent death make it impossible for him to go on with his life. ``A Situation'' gives an extended view of a young salesman rendered all but immobile by feelings of inadequacy in his job and by guilt at having had sex with his fianc‚e's sister. These frailties also drive some characters to escape in fantasy, as in ``O Jesus, Here Come the Dwarfs,'' in which a potato-picker finds himself befriending, then defending, a group of little people; it's likely, we come to realize, that the whole incident occurred entirely in the man's frantic imagination. Common to these portraits of the downtrodden and the self-defeated are a dark hilarity and a lyricism that underscores each bleak encounter, slashing through with razor-sharp emphasis. Giving a crisp measure of the author's vision, these are tales that further demonstrate Kelman's angry, distinctive voice and his unsettling vision of modern life. (The Great Scots Reading Tour with Irvine Welsh, Duncan McLean, and James Kelman) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Alex Chisholm, Boston Phoenix
This is a peak literary experience, a reminder of why we ever took up reading fiction in the first place.


A. O. Scott, Village Voice
Busted Scotch brings to mind, at various moments, such diverse masterpieces of the short story as James Joyce's Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and the parables of Kafka. But in his humanity and integrity, the writer Kelman recalls at his best . . . is Chekhov.


Russell Banks
James Kelman is one of the new, true masters of millennial English, and his best stories are great stories, as dark, tough-minded, and funny as any I've read in years.


Book Description
Busted Scotch is a selection by James Kelman of 35 short stories--most of them published in this country for the first time--from over two decades of his work. They reveal 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 in the primacy of his character's language and culture.


Card catalog description
This collection of 35 short stories - most of them being published in this country for the first time - has been selected and arranged by James Kelman himself from over two decades of his work. The stories of Busted Scotch are set in the working-class milieu of Scotland and England - the 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 offhand to the highly farcical, and in subject matter from the casual everyday tragedies to the heartbreaking vicissitudes of romance and language.


About the Author
James Kelman's previous books include the novels The Busconductor Hines, A Chancer, A Disaffection, and a number of short story collections. He lives in Glasgow.He is the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel How late it was, how late.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This collection of 35 short stories - most of them being published in this country for the first time - has been selected and arranged by James Kelman himself from over two decades of his work. The stories of Busted Scotch are set in the working-class milieu of Scotland and England - the 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 offhand to the highly farcical, and in subject matter from the casual everyday tragedies to the heartbreaking vicissitudes of romance and language.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The title of this collection of 35 highly original stories by the Booker Prize-winning author of How late it was, how late comes from a one-page vignette about an unnamed Scot in a cabaret who blows his week's wages on one hand of blackjackand he's one of the sunnier of his countrymen on display here. From the pool-hall habitus of "Remember Young Cecil" to the hallucinating alcoholic of "O Jesus, Here Come the Dwarfs," to the emotionally crippled young father of "By the Burn," Kelman's protagonists are desperate, angry people who live in industrialized settings that afford them no breathing space or peace of mind. Despite fancying himself a "natural born beggar," the narrator of "Not Not While the Giro" finds himself so hard up for a smoke that he sucks his thumb to taste the nicotine residue there. Even his dreams are feeble: he longs to become an enigmatic figure who, with his feet, traces the coastline of Scotland while living off the good graces of the townsfolk he meets. Kelman is a brilliant aural portraitistwith the rhythm of his countrymen's speech apparently ingrained on his psycheand a writer utterly unfazed by risk. (One story trails off mid-rant, another transforms a man's pushing his son into a vat of acid into an act of love.) Thirteen of these stories have appeared previously in the States (10 in Greyhound for Breakfast), but even these are worth re-reading. All told, this collection provides a tasty sampling of Kelman's finest fancies. (May) FYI: Kelman will take part in a five-city Great Scots Reading Tour, along with Irvine Welsh and Duncan McLean.

Library Journal

The Scotsmen in these stories and fragments (some no more than a paragraph or two) by Booker Prize winner Kelman live in squats, caravans, and tenements, on the dole and on the edge. They would be working-class if they worked, but they're layabouts and idlers who prefer to sponge off their mates and neighbors. The narrator of "Not While the Giro" considers himself a late starter, but, by most standards, he's a nonstarter. He worries that he's losing his mind, but his very self-awareness convinces himself otherwise as he muses, "Often I sit by my window in order to sort myself out--a group therapy within." In "A Situation," a boarding house tenant is asked down to the room of an elderly invalid who confesses to an old crime of industrial sabotage while the younger man is haunted by his own secret, an infidelity with his girlfriend's sister. The reader may not wish to know these characters well but will be grateful for the opportunity of this brief meeting. Recommended for literary collections.Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., Ontario

Kirkus Reviews

Capitalizing on his 1995 Booker novel, How late it was, how late, Kelman offers this compendium of 35 stories—10 culled from his only other collection to have appeared here (Greyhound for Breakfast, 1988)—portraying the down-and-out of Scottish society.

The focus of these pieces (some of them a few paragraphs long), rendered in the frank, ferocious style for which Kelman has been rightly acclaimed, never shifts far from the working poor or the unemployed in Glasgow. Young or old, male or female, all of Kelman's characters are scarred both by poverty and by the inner frailties that poverty and violence give rise to. These wounds are often only incompletely perceived by the protagonists. "No Long the Warehouseman" describes a man who has ended up on the dole for reasons he can't explain to himself, let alone to his wife. In "By the Burn," a father finds that memories of his daughter's violent death make it impossible for him to go on with his life. "A Situation" gives an extended view of a young salesman rendered all but immobile by feelings of inadequacy in his job and by guilt at having had sex with his fiancée's sister. These frailties also drive some characters to escape in fantasy, as in "O Jesus, Here Come the Dwarfs," in which a potato-picker finds himself befriending, then defending, a group of little people; it's likely, we come to realize, that the whole incident occurred entirely in the man's frantic imagination. Common to these portraits of the downtrodden and the self-defeated are a dark hilarity and a lyricism that underscores each bleak encounter, slashing through with razor-sharp emphasis.

Giving a crisp measure of the author's vision, these are tales that further demonstrate Kelman's angry, distinctive voice and his unsettling vision of modern life.