Novelist, playwright, essayist, and master of the short story. Artist and engaged working-class intellectual; husband, father, and grandfather as well as committed revolutionary activist.
From his first publication (a short story collection An Old Pub Near the Angel on a tiny American press) through his latest novel (God's Teeth and other Phenomena) and work with Noam Chomsky (Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime--both published on a slightly larger American press), All We Have Is the Story chronicles the life and work--to date--of "Probably the most influential novelist of the post-war period." (The Times)
Drawing
deeply on a radical tradition that is simultaneously political,
philosophical, cultural, and literary, James Kelman articulates the
complexities and tensions of the craft of writing; the narrative voice
and grammar; imperialism and language; art and value; solidarity and
empathy; class and nation state; and. above all, that it begins and ends
with the story.
"One of the things the establishment always does
is isolate voices of dissent and make them specific--unique if possible.
It's easy to dispense with dissent if you can say there's him in prose
and him in poetry. As soon as you say there's him, him, and her there,
and that guy here and that woman over there, and there's all these other
writers in Africa, and then you've got Ireland, the Caribean--suddenly
there's this kind of mass dissent going on, and that becomes something
dangerous, something that the establishment won't want people to relate
to and go Christ, you're doing the same as me. Suddenly there's a
movement going on. It's fine when it's all these disparate voices; you
can contain that. The first thing to do with dissent is say 'You're on
your own, you're a phenomenon.' I'm not a phenomenon at all: I'm just a
part of what's been happening in prose for a long, long while." --James
Kelman from a 1993 interview