When I Was That Age Did Art Exist?

This is a big bundle of essays and written talks, put down over a long number of years: Kelman hopes some of them make you smile.

James Kelman began as a writer of fiction and became a writer of nonfiction in the bargain. He had a short story set for his first ever publication that the printer refused to print on the grounds of "blasphemy." He searched the story for this "blasphemy" but couldn't find any. He solved the problem by submitting a different story. In the years to follow the hostility didn't vanish. He began to challenge, saying what he thought and why he thought it. Defending is a drain on one's energy. But when attacked directly it is hard to walk on.

This collection of twenty-four essays—personal, political, and in between—tells the intertwined tales of art, literature, history, culture, and life. They look and question not through an academic lens of literary theory and the great traditions but through lived experience and resistance to the status quo. From class, ethnicity, and other borders to one's ability as a writer to earn a living, or not, in order to survive in the drudgery of capitalism. And therefore, whose stories do we experience? Can we see ourselves in them? What is lost or hidden?

Amidst these questions are glimpses into the life of an artist and the connections made. Weaving stories of childhood, the importance of bookshops, to the people met along the way that make a world whole.