Greyhound for Breakfast (Picador Books)

This collection of stories by James Kelman is one of my favorites. His subjects are everyday people: menial laborers, folks on the dole, people with relationships good and bad, friends faithful and not-so-faithful. His language is sometimes harsh, but it never seems false. These characters seem to be real as if they could step right off the page into your hands. Sometimes the scottish dialect is difficult for me to comprehend, but that is more than offset by the realism (equally as realistic, I think, as good hardboiled crime fiction, though that seems like an odd comparison, to me) and by the humour of the stories. These stories are hilarious. Often the figures are lonely, pathetic, or sorrowful, failures in the eyes of many, but Kelman never denigrates or looks down upon his characters. He renders them with the greatest humanity and conveys them to the reader with much respect.Kelman's stories always make me laugh, and make me feel, and this collection surely has done both, a couple of times over.