God's Teeth and Other Phenomena

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 writ ing, 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.


Genre: General Fiction

"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

"The greatest living British novelist." - Amit Chaudhuri

"What an enviably, devilishly wonderful writer is James Kelman." - John Hawkes

"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

"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

"James Kelman changed my life." - Douglas Stuart

"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