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This story of a man attempting not to go mad when forced to stop his own writing in order to teach is a brilliant satire of contemporary literary culture.
List of contents
Chapters
1 Eighteen Months Later!
2 Who did you say you were again?
3 Stan scrached his head
4 Flying seagulls and that Belgian guy
5 The Patience to Live
6 Who I am
7 Excuse me are you expecting a writer today?
8 His eyes drifted skyward
9 Art students interested in art
10 Matters Empathetic
11 School in the Morning
12 . . . then in the Afternoon
13 Shared Roots
14 Square-toed Luggers
15 I could have been a Dance Troupe!
16 Little Georgic
17 The Vanity of the Poet-Professor
18 Dont mess with Miles
19 On We Go
20 In Time
21 All is not Lost
22 The Pattern
24 My name is so and so and I am a writer
25 The Only Resident in the Entire Fucking Dump
26 Horrible Nonsense
27 There we are
28 When Hannah thought of me I was thinking of her
29 Horrible Nonsense right enough
30 Ever Thus
31 I would have wanted to batter somebody
32 A Proper Event
33 Miaow
34 The Gory Details
35 Feet Without One’s Partner
36 The Ugly Troot
37 Ghost Writers in the Sky
38 Knackert
39 Agatha Christie to Gertrude Stein
40 How long is a short story?
41 The Terms
42 Easy does it
43 Grounds for Optimism
44 Writers go away and come back
45 Later it was later
46 The difficulty of the I-voice ending
47 Tallulah & the Vamps
48 Ach
49 Aye and fuck them all
Notes toward the Author’s Preface to 'Afterword', inserted and accepted as afterword in-itself
Afterword, by Jermyn Gerald-Brooke
About the author
James Kelman was born in Glasgow, June 1946, and left school in 1961. He began work in the printing trade then moved around, working in various jobs in various places. He was living in England when he started writing: ramblings, musings, sundry phantasmagoria. He committed to it and kept at it. In 1969 he met and married Marie Connors from South Wales. They settled in Glasgow and still live in the dump, not far from their kids and grandkids. He still plugs away at the ramblings, musings, politicking and so on, supported by the same lady.
