A literary event: the selected stories of the acclaimed author of the Booker Prize-winning How late it was, how late, most of them being published in this country for the first time. This collection of 35 short stories has been selected and arranged by James Kelman himself from over two decades of his work. It reveals 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 that language, not literature, makes the culture. The stories in Busted Scotch are set in the working-class milieu of Scotland and Englandthe 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 casual to the highly farcical, and in subject matter from casual everyday tragedies to the heartbreaking vicissitudes of romance and language. Each of these stories manages the near-miracle of giving eloquent voice to the previously inarticulate. Some of them will strike readers as masterpiecesall of them created out of low life, high art. Read Less