The Burn

by James Kelman

Book Overview

Passionate, exhilarating and darkly humorous, 'The Burn' is an extraordinary collection of short stories by a master of paranoia and an unsurpassed prose stylist. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1846970539
• ISBN13: 9781846970535
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Birlinn Publishers
• Length: 248 Pages

Customer Reviews

Hard nosed stories from Scotland

James Kelman is best known for the controversial Booker Prize winning novel "How late it was, how late". However, he has also written some excellent short fiction, as this collection proves. And short is the operative word - there are 26 stories in less than 250 pages, many as short as two pages. Mostly they concern people living quietly desperate lives - people who just seem to find living in the world more difficult than they should, or at least than others apparently do. Some of the stories, such as "Pictures" and "Lassies are trained that way" focus on the impossibility of communication between the sexes, but from an unusual angle - that of the self conscious working class man, who is painfully aware of how all his words are being misinterpreted, but cannot find an alternative approach. "A Walk in the Park" is one of the few stories where love transcends despair to provide some measure of redemption, but my personal favourite has to be "Naval History", a hilarious tale of a setup in a bookstore