Busted Scotch: Selected Stories
The stories in James Kelman's collection,Busted Scotchare 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 novelHow Late  It Was, How Late,has selected the 35 stories inBusted Scotchfrom more  than 20 years' work. Many of these stories make their American debut in this collection.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.