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Jack Proctor, a celebrated older writer and curmudgeon, goes off to residency where he is to be an honored part of teaching and giving public readings, he soon finds the atmosphere of the literary world has changed since his last foray into the public sphere. Unknown to most, unable to work on his own writing, surrounded by a host of odd characters, would-be writers, antagonists, handlers, and members of the elite House of Art and Aesthetics, Proctor finds himself driven to distraction (literally in a very very tiny car). This is a story of a man attempting not to go mad when forced to stop his own writing in order to coach others to write. Proctor’s tour of rural places, pubs, theaters, fancy parties, where he is to be headlining as a "Banker-Prize-Winning-Author" reads like a literary version of Spinal Tap. Uproariously funny, brilliantly philosophical, gorgeously written this is James Kelman at his best.
“God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena is electric. Forget all the rubbish you’ve been told about how to write, the requirements of the marketplace and the much vaunted ‘readability’ that is supposed to be sacrosanct. This is a book about how art gets made, its murky, obsessive, unedifying demands and the endless, sometimes hilarious, humiliations literary life inflicts on even its most successful names.”
—Eimear McBride author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians
“James Kelman is an extraordinary writer—smart and incisive, witty and warm, with prose so alive it practically sparks off the page. God's Teeth and Other Phenomena is one of the wisest, funniest and most brutally honest books I've read in ages. I loved it.”
—Molly Antopol, author of The Unamericans
“Probably the most influential novelist of the post-war period.”
—The Times
“Kelman has the knack, maybe more than anyone since Joyce, of fixing in his writing the lyricism of ordinary people’s speech … Pure aesthete, undaunted democrat—somehow Kelman manages to reconcile his two halves.”
—Esquire (London)
“The greatest British novelist of our time.”
—Sunday Herald
“A true original … A real artist … it’s now very difficult to see which of his peers can seriously be ranked alongside [Kelman] without ironic eyebrows being raised.”
—Irvine Welsh, Guardian
“A writer of world stature, a 21st century Modern.”
—The Scotsman
“The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren’t supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead. Dead, and wrapped up in a Penguin Classic: that’s when it’s safe to regret that their work was underappreciated or misunderstood (or how little they were paid) in their lifetimes. You can write what you like about Beckett or Kafka and know they’re not going to come round and tell you you’re talking nonsense, or confound your expectations with a new work. Kelman is still alive, still writing great books, climbing.”
—James Meek, London Review of Books
“The greatest living British novelist.”
—Amit Chaudhuri, author of A New World, Frieze Magazine
“What an enviably, devilishly wonderful writer is James Kelman.”
—John Hawkes, author of The Blood Oranges
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