The Story of the Stone: Tales, Entreaties, and Incantations

James Kelman

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James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create.

This collection of nearly a hundred pieces of very short fiction spans five decades and reveals James Kelman’s mastery of the form. As ever, Kelman insists on his characters telling their stories in their own voices, whether in working-class Glaswegian dialect or the dull menace of bureaucratic babble. Everyday tragedy and bleak humor color these marvels of narrative efficiency, yet at their core they are tender and full of human truth.

“James Kelman changed my life.” 

—Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

“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