All We Have is the Story

Novelist, playwright, essayist, and master of the shortstory. Artist and engaged working-class intellectual. A proud husband, father,and grandfather as well as committed revolutionary activist.

From his first publication (a short story collection AnOld Pub Near the Angel on a tiny American press) through his latest novel (God'sTeeth and other Phenomena) and work with Noam Chomsky (Between Thought andExpression Lies a Lifetime—both published on a slightly larger Americanpress), 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 simultaneouslypolitical, philosophical, cultural, and literary, James Kelman articulates thecomplexities and tensions of the craft of writing; the narrative voice andgrammar; imperialism and language; art and value; solidarity and empathy; classand nation state; and. above all, that it begins and ends with the story.

“One of the things the establishment always does is isolatevoices of dissent and make them specific—unique if possible. It's easy todispense with dissent if you can say there's him in prose and him in poetry. Assoon as you say there's him, him, and her there, and that guy here and thatwoman over there, and there's all these other writers in Africa, and thenyou've got Ireland, the Caribean—suddenly there's this kind of mass dissentgoing on, and that becomes something dangerous, something that theestablishment won't want people to relate to and go Christ, you're doing thesame as me. Suddenly there's a movement going on. It's fine when it's all thesedisparate voices; you can contain that. The first thing to do with dissent issay ‘You're on your own, you're a phenomenon.’ I'm not a phenomenon at all: I'mjust a part of what's been happening in prose for a long, long while.” —JamesKelman from a 1993 interview